o that the morning-room afforded a pleasant contrast.
Here all the comfort that remained at Chetwynde seemed to have
centred. It was with a feeling of intense satisfaction that the
General seated himself in an arm-chair which stood within the deep
recess of the bay-window, and surveyed the apartment.

The room was about forty feet long and thirty feet wide. The ceiling
was covered with quaint figures in fresco, the walls were paneled
with oak, and high-backed, stolid-looking chairs stood around. On one
side was the fire-place, so vast and so high that it seemed itself
another room. It was the fine old fire-place of the Tudor or
Plantagenet period--the unequaled, the unsurpassed--whose day has
long since been done, and which in departing from the world has left
nothing to compensate for it. Still, the fireplace lingers in a few
old mansions; and here at Chetwynde Castle was one without a peer.
It was lofty, it was broad, it was deep, it was well-paved, it was
ornamented not carelessly, but lovingly, as though the hearth was the
holy place, the altar of the castle and of the family. There was room
in its wide expanse for the gathering of a household about the fire;
its embrace was the embrace of love; and it was the type and model of
those venerable and hallowed places which have given to the English
language a word holier even than "Home," since that word is "Hearth."

It was with some such thoughts as these that General Pomeroy sat
looking at the fire-place, where a few fagots sent up a ruddy blaze,
when suddenly his attention was arrested by a figure which entered
the room. So quiet and noiseless was the entrance that he did not
notice it until the figure stood between him and the fire. It was a
woman; and certainly, of all the women whom he had ever seen, no one
had possessed so weird and mystical an aspect. She was a little over
the middle height, but exceedingly thin and emaciated. She wore a cap
and a gown of black serge, and looked more like a Sister of Charity
than any thing else. Her features were thin and shrunken, her cheeks
hollow, her chin peaked, and her hair was as white as snow. Yet the
hair was very thick, and the cap could not conceal its heavy white
masses. Her side-face was turned toward him, and he could not see
her fully at first, until at length she turned toward a picture which
hung over the fire-place, and stood regarding it fixedly.

It was the portrait of a young man in the dress of a British