king in
a whisper because now it seemed to him that nothing would serve but that
this clamorous silence should be stilled by a human voice.

"The old man said it would be thus--all emptiness, and not profit to a
man; and he died, and I tended him. Dear Jesus! how our good deeds come
home to us! And he told me how the last of the great family had gone
away none knew whither. And the tales I heard in the town--how the great
man had not gone, but lived here in hiding---- It is not possible. There
is the silence of death in this house."

He moistened his lips with his tongue. The stillness of the place seemed
to press upon him like a solid thing. "It is like a dead man on one's
shoulders," thought the thief, and he straightened himself up and
whispered again: "The old man said, 'The door with the carved griffin,
and the roses enwreathed, and the seventh rose holds the secret in its
heart.'"

With that the thief set forth again, creeping softly across the bars of
moonlight down the corridor.

And after much seeking he found at last, under the angle of the great
stone staircase behind a mouldering tapestry wrought with peacocks and
pines, a door, and on it carved a griffin, wreathed about with roses. He
pressed his finger into the deep heart of each carven rose, and when he
pressed the rose that was seventh in number from the griffin, he felt
the inmost part of it move beneath his finger as though it sought to
escape. So he pressed more strongly, leaning against the door till it
swung open, and he passed through it, looking behind him to see that
nothing followed. The door he closed as he entered.

And now he was, as it seemed, in some other house. The chambers were
large and lofty as those whose hushed emptiness he had explored--but
these rooms seemed warm with life, yet held no threat, no terror. To the
dim yellow flicker from the lantern came out of the darkness hints of a
crowded magnificence, a lavish profusion of beautiful objects such as he
had never in his life dreamed of, though all that life had been one
dream of the lovely treasures which rich men hoard, and which, by the
thief's skill and craft, may come to be his.

He passed through the rooms, turning the light of his lantern this way
and that, and ever the darkness withheld more than the light revealed.
He knew that thick tapestries hung from the walls, velvet curtains
masked the windows; his hand, exploring eagerly, felt the rich carving
of chairs and pr