e perplexity arose. For though I was certain where the
door should be, there was never a sign of it inside--nothing but a row
of iron-barred windows along the wall, like the corridor of a jail.
When I came to look a little closer, I found that the doorway had been
bricked up and plastered, so that by the ground-floor there was
positively no entrance to the house.

With some misgivings, I wandered on to the great kitchen where Tim and I
had had such a fright. But it was empty now, and the sun, as it glanced
through the guarded window, fell brightly on the white hearthstone.
Nor, though all was still as death, could my ears catch a single sound,
except the stamping of the horses without and the idle tapping of my
lady's whip against the pilaster of the door.

I traversed the corridor to the other end. It opened into a large room
of the same size as the kitchen, evidently a dining-room, for a long
table stood in the middle, and a solitary, moth-eaten stag's head, with
antlers broken, hung over the chimney-piece.

Other doors opened off the corridor, and beyond them, along the back of
the house and overlooking the boggy lake, ran another corridor, out of
which no door opened to the outer world.

There was no sign of life anywhere, and the few pieces of furniture,
rotten and withered with time, were more deathlike than if the house had
been stark empty.

I returned upstairs, and on my way peeped into this room and that out of
curiosity. But all was the same. Only in the last of all, at the end
of the landing, did I see anything. There, on the window-ledge, covered
with dust, which made it seem part of the woodwork it rested on, lay a
little shabby book. How it caught my eye I hardly know, except that,
believing in Providence as I do, I suppose it had lain there all those
years, like the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale, waiting for me to
discover it.

I remember, as I lifted it, the under cover stuck fast to the window-
ledge and parted company with the rest of the book.

It was a common little volume of English ballads, with nothing much to
commend it to the book lover. But the sight of it moved me strangely,
for not only was it the same work, only another volume, as that I had
brought away from the old home at Fanad, but on the front page, in my
mother's hand, was written in faded ink, "Mary Gallagher, her book. A
gift from her dear mistress." I thrust the precious relic hurriedly
into my pocket, and cas