the inhabitants of the house must
surely come in and warm themselves. Ascending to the upper floor, I saw
the rooms made familiar to me by the Report of the Trial. I entered
the little study, with the old books on the shelves, and the key still
missing from the locked door of communication with the bedchamber.
I looked into the room in which the unhappy mistress of Gleninch had
suffered and died. The bed was left in its place; the sofa on which the
nurse had snatched her intervals of repose was at its foot; the Indian
cabinet, in which the crumpled paper with the grains of arsenic had been
found, still held its little collection of curiosities. I moved on its
pivot the invalid-table on which she had taken her meals and written her
poems, poor soul. The place was dreary and dreadful; the heavy air
felt as if it were still burdened with its horrid load of misery and
distrust. I was glad to get out (after a passing glance at the room
which Eustace had occupied in those days) into the Guests' Corridor.
There was the bedroom, at the door of which Miserrimus Dexter had waited
and watched. There was the oaken floor along which he had hopped, in his
horrible way, following the footsteps of the servant disguised in her
mistress's clothes. Go where I might, the ghosts of the dead and the
absent were with me, step by step. Go where I might, the lonely horror
of the house had its still and awful voice for Me: "_I_ keep the secret
of the Poison! _I_ hide the mystery of the death!"

The oppression of the place became unendurable. I longed for the pure
sky and the free air. My companion noticed and understood me.

"Come," he said. "We have had enough of the house. Let us look at the
grounds."

In the gray quiet of the evening we roamed about the lonely gardens, and
threaded our way through the rank, neglected shrubberies. Wandering here
and wandering there, we drifted into the kitchen garden--with one little
patch still sparely cultivated by the old man and his wife, and all the
rest a wilderness of weeds. Beyond the far end of the garden, divided
from it by a low paling of wood, there stretched a patch of waste
ground, sheltered on three sides by trees. In one lost corner of the
ground an object, common enough elsewhere, attracted my attention
here. The object was a dust-heap. The great size of it, and the curious
situation in which it was placed, aroused a moment's languid curiosity
in me. I stopped, and looked at the dust and ash