angle of the front wall of the building, he descended some
steps, advanced along a paved walk, turned another angle, and found
himself in a strip of garden ground at the back of the house.

Behind him was a row of small rooms situated on the level of the
servants' offices. In front of him, on the further side of the little
garden, rose a wall, screened by a laurel hedge, and having a door at
one end of it, leading past the stables to a gate that opened on the
high-road. Perceiving that he had only discovered thus far the shorter
way to the house, used by the servants and trades-people, Midwinter
turned back again, and looked in at the window of one of the rooms on
the basement story as he passed it. Were these the servants' offices?
No; the offices were apparently in some other part of the ground-floor;
the window he had looked in at was the window of a lumber-room. The
next two rooms in the row were both empty. The fourth window, when he
approached it, presented a little variety. It served also as a door; and
it stood open to the garden at that moment.

Attracted by the book-shelves which he noticed on one of the walls,
Midwinter stepped into the room.

The books, few in number, did not detain him long; a glance at their
backs was enough without taking them down. The Waverley Novels, Tales
by Miss Edgeworth, and by Miss Edgeworth's many followers, the Poems of
Mrs. Hemans, with a few odd volumes of the illustrated gift-books of
the period, composed the bulk of the little library. Midwinter turned to
leave the room, when an object on one side of the window, which he had
not previously noticed, caught his attention and stopped him. It was a
statuette standing on a bracket--a reduced copy of the famous Niobe of
the Florence Museum. He glanced from the statuette to the window, with a
sudden doubt which set his heart throbbing fast. It was a French window.
He looked out with a suspicion which he had not felt yet. The view
before him was the view of a lawn and garden. For a moment his mind
struggled blindly to escape the conclusion which had seized it, and
struggled in vain. Here, close round him and close before him--here,
forcing him mercilessly back from the happy present to the horrible
past, was the room that Allan had seen in the Second Vision of the
Dream.

He waited, thinking and looking round him while he thought. There
was wonderfully little disturbance in his face and manner; he looked
steadily from one to th