the way through several halls and
lobbies up the great staircase, along a corridor, through a suite of
rooms, upon another lobby up a second staircase, into a great dreary
passage, through half a dozen waste and desolate chambers, and so at
last into a room which had a few pieces of furniture at one end of it,
and a log of wood smouldering and smoking on the hearth.

In truth it was a melancholy place, haunted by dismal reverberations and
a deathlike atmosphere--everywhere mildewed, faded, and half rotten with
decay. It was a place where crimes might be committed, unrecorded and
unsuspected--where screams would lose themselves in vacancy, and
desolation and solitude would swallow up the ghastly evidences of
outrage. Here was the fitting scenery for tales of preternatural terror
or fiendish crime. Lucille felt her heart sink within her as she entered
this vast and awful labyrinth. But she felt that, be her destiny what it
might, she had herself no power to mend it. What resource was left to
her? Necessity retained her amidst the menacing solitudes of this
half-ruined mansion.

Blassemare left her to the care of the old crone, who, to judge from
appearances, was hardly an improvement upon the ungracious attendant she
had left at the Chateau des Anges. This hag had evidently the worst
possible opinion of her guest, and took no pains to affect a respect
which she was far from feeling. She contented herself with offering
Lucille some supper, and this declined, showed her the bedroom that was
prepared for her--a room of the same depressing vastness, and offering,
in its shabby and niggard furniture, a contrast to its majestic
dimensions.

Such as it was, however, it was welcome. Lucille was exhausted with the
anxieties and agitations of the day, as well as with her late and rapid
journey. Having examined the room with a fearful scrutiny, she succeeded
in bolting one of the doors, and placed the only chair the room
contained against the other; so that she might, at least, be warned by
the noise, in the event of any persons forcing an entrance. She lay down
without taking off her clothes, and leaving the candle unextinguished.

For a long time the excitement of her strange situation, and the alarms
that environed her, chased sleep away, worn and exhausted as she was.
After a while, however, fatigue began to confuse her thoughts with
interposing visions. The dreary chamber faded from her view; her heavy
eyelids closed; fant