.

"Follow me," said Mrs. Macallan, mounting the stairs in the dark. "I
know where to find him."

We groped our way up the stairs to the first landing. The next flight of
steps, turning in the reverse direction, was faintly illuminated, like
the hall below, by one oil-lamp, placed in some invisible position above
us. Ascending the second flight of stairs and crossing a short corridor,
we discovered the lamp, through the open door of a quaintly shaped
circular room, burning on the mantel-piece. Its light illuminated a
strip of thick tapestry, hanging loose from the ceiling to the floor, on
the wall opposite to the door by which we had entered.

Mrs. Macallan drew aside the strip of tapestry, and, signing me to
follow her, passed behind it.

"Listen!" she whispered.

Standing on the inner side of the tapestry, I found myself in a dark
recess or passage, at the end of which a ray of light from the lamp
showed me a closed door. I listened, and heard on the other side of
the door a shouting voice, accompanied by an extraordinary rumbling
and whistling sound, traveling backward and forward, as well as I could
judge, over a great space. Now the rumbling and the whistling would
reach their climax of loudness, and would overcome the resonant notes of
the shouting voice. Then again those louder sounds gradually retreated
into distance, and the shouting voice made itself heard as the more
audible sound of the two. The door must have been of prodigious
solidity. Listen as intently as I might, I failed to catch the
articulate words (if any) which the voice was pronouncing, and I was
equally at a loss to penetrate the cause which produced the rumbling and
whistling sounds.

"What can possibly be going on," I whispered to Mrs. Macallan, "on the
other side of that door?"

"Step softly," my mother-in-law answered, "and come and see."

She arranged the tapestry behind us so as completely to shut out the
light in the circular room. Then noiselessly turning the handle, she
opened the heavy door.

We kept ourselves concealed in the shadow of the recess, and looked
through the open doorway.

I saw (or fancied I saw, in the obscurity) a long room with a low
ceiling. The dying gleam of an ill-kept fire formed the only light by
which I could judge of objects and distances. Redly illuminating the
central portion of the room, opposite to which we were standing, the
fire-light left the extremities shadowed in almost total darkness. I