be of a different colour from the
surrounding portion.

Curiosity and increased interest prompted him at once to make a closer
inquiry into the matter; and, by a careful and diligent scrutiny, he was
almost induced to come to the positive opinion, that it no very distant
period in time past, the portrait had been removed from the place it
occupied.

When once this idea, even vague and indistinct as it was, in consequence
of the slight grounds he formed it on, had got possession of his mind,
he felt most anxious to prove its verification or its fallacy.

He held the candle in a variety of situations, so that its light fell in
different ways on the picture; and the more he examined it, the more he
felt convinced that it must have been moved lately.

It would appear as if, in its removal, a piece of the old oaken carved
framework of the panel had been accidentally broken off, which caused
the new look of the fracture, and that this accident, from the nature of
the broken bit of framing, could have occurred in any other way than
from an actual or attempted removal of the picture, he felt was
extremely unlikely.

He set down the candle on a chair near at hand, and tried if the panel
was fast in its place. Upon the very first touch, he felt convinced it
was not so, and that it easily moved. How to get it out, though,
presented a difficulty, and to get it out was tempting.

"Who knows," he said to himself, "what may be behind it? This is an old
baronial sort of hall, and the greater portion of it was, no doubt,
built at a time when the construction of such places as hidden chambers
and intricate staircases were, in all buildings of importance,
considered a disiderata."

That he should make some discovery behind the portrait, now became an
idea that possessed him strongly, although he certainly had no definite
grounds for really supposing that he should do so.

Perhaps the wish was more father to the thought than he, in the partial
state of excitement he was in, really imagined; but so it was. He felt
convinced that he should not be satisfied until he had removed that
panel from the wall, and seen what was immediately behind it.

After the panel containing the picture had been placed where it was, it
appeared that pieces of moulding had been inserted all around, which had
had the effect of keeping it in its place, and it was a fracture of one
of these pieces which had first called Charles Holland's attention to
the