esses; the great beds were hung with silken cloth
wrought in gold thread with glimmering strange starry devices. Broad
sideboards flashed back to his lantern's questionings the faint white
laugh of silver; the tall cabinets could not, with all their reserve,
suppress the confession of wrought gold, and, from the caskets into
whose depths he flashed the light, came the trembling avowal of rich
jewels. And now, at last, that carved door closed between him and the
poignant silence of the deserted corridors, the thief felt a sudden
gaiety of heart, a sense of escape, of security. He was alone, yet
warmed and companioned. The silence here was no longer a horror, but a
consoler, a friend.

And, indeed, now he was not alone. The ample splendours about him, the
spoils which long centuries had yielded to the grasp of a noble
family--these were companions after his own heart.

He flung open the shade of his lantern and held it high above his head.
The room still kept half its secrets. The discretion of the darkness
should be broken down. He must see more of this splendour--not in
unsatisfying dim detail, but in the lit gorgeous mass of it. The narrow
bar of the lantern's light chafed him. He sprang on to the dining-table,
and began to light the half-burnt chandelier. There were a hundred
candles, and he lighted all, so that the chandelier swung like a vast
living jewel in the centre of the hall. Then, as he turned, all the
colour in the room leapt out at him. The purple of the couches, the
green gleam of the delicate glass, the blue of the tapestries, and the
vivid scarlet of the velvet hangings, and with the colour sprang the
gleams of white from the silver, of yellow from the gold, of
many-coloured fire from strange inlaid work and jewelled caskets, till
the thief stood aghast with rapture in the strange, sudden revelation of
this concentrated splendour.

He went along the walls with a lighted candle in his hand--the wax
dripped warm over his fingers as he went--lighting one after another,
the tapers in the sconces of the silver-framed glasses. In the state
bedchamber he drew back suddenly, face to face with a death-white
countenance in which black eyes blazed at him with triumph and delight.
Then he laughed aloud. He had not known his own face in the strange
depths of this mirror. It had no sconces like the others, or he would
have known it for what it was. It was framed in Venice glass--wonderful,
gleaming, iridescent.