uttoned the heavy fur coat he
had never yet taken off more closely round him.

"What about that man from Carlisle--and the furnace?" he inquired
sharply.

"He comes to-morrow, sir. I could not get him here earlier. I fear it
will be an expensive job."

"No matter. With my work, I cannot risk incessant attacks of rheumatism.
The thing must be done, and done well. Good-night to you, Tyson."

Mr. Melrose waved a dismissing hand. "We shall resume our discussion
to-morrow."

The agent departed. Melrose, left solitary, remained standing a while
before the fire, examining attentively the architecture and decorations
of the room, so far as the miserable light revealed them. Italian, no
doubt, the stucco work of the ceiling, with its embossed nymphs and
cupids, its classical medallions. Not of the finest kind or period, but
very charming--quite decorative. The house had been built on the site of
an ancient border fortess, toward the middle of the eighteenth century,
by the chief of a great family, from whose latest representative, his
mother's first cousin, Edmund Melrose had now inherited it. Nothing could
be more curious than its subsequent history. For it was no sooner
finished, in a pure Georgian style, and lavishly incrusted in all its
principal rooms with graceful decoration, than the man who built it died.
His descendants, who had plenty of houses in more southern and populous
regions, turned their backs upon the Tower, refused to live in it, and,
failing to find a tenant of the gentry class, let part of it to the
farmer, and put in a gardener as caretaker. Yet a certain small sum had
always been allowed for keeping it in repair, and it was only within the
last few years that dilapidation had made head.

Melrose took up the lamp, and carried it once more through the
ground-floor of the Tower. Save for the dying fires, and the sputtering
lamp, everything was dark and still in the spacious house. The storm was
dying down in fitful gusts that seemed at intervals to invade the shadowy
spaces of the corridor, driving before them the wisps of straw and paper
that had been left here and there by the unpacking of the great
writing-table. There could be no ghosts in the house, for nothing but a
fraction of it had ever sheltered life; yet from its architectural
beauty there breathed a kind of dumb, human protest against the
disorderly ill-treatment to which it had been subjected.

In spite of his excitement and pre-occupati