e hall.

The house had not been dismantled, although things had at different
times been taken from it, and when Donal opened a leaf of shutter, he
saw tables and chairs and cabinets inlaid with silver and ivory. The
room looked stately, but everything was deep in dust; carpets and
curtains were thick with the deserted sepulchres of moths; and the air
somehow suggested a tomb: Donal thought of the tombs of the kings of
Egypt before ravaging conquerors broke into them, when they were yet
full of all such gorgeous furniture as great kings desired, against the
time when the souls should return to reanimate the bodies so carefully
spiced and stored to welcome them, and the great kings would be
themselves again, with the added wisdom of the dead and judged.
Conscious of a curious timidity, feeling a kind of awesomeness about
every form in the room, he stepped softly to the bureau, applied its
key, and following carefully the directions the earl had given him, for
the lock was Italian, with more than one quip and crank and wanton wile
about it, succeeded in opening it. He had no difficulty in finding its
secret place, nor the packet concealed in it; but just as he laid his
hands on it, he was aware of a swift passage along the floor without,
past the door of the room, and apparently up the next stair. There was
nothing he could distinguish as footsteps, or as the rustle of a dress;
it seemed as if he had heard but a disembodied motion! He darted to the
door, which he had by habit closed behind him, and opened it
noiselessly. The stairs above as below were covered with thick carpet:
any light human foot might pass without a sound; only haste would
murmur the secret to the troubled air.

He turned, replaced the packet, and closed the bureau. If there was any
one in the house, he must know it, and who could tell what might
follow! It was the merest ghost of a sound he had heard, but he must go
after it! Some intruder might be using the earl's house for his own
purposes!

Going softly up, he paused at the top of the second stair, and looked
around him. An iron-clenched door stood nearly opposite the head of it;
and at the farther end of a long passage, on whose sides were several
closed doors, was one partly open. From that direction came the sound
of a little movement, and then of low voices--one surely that of a
woman! It flashed upon him that this must be the trysting-place of Eppy
and Forgue. Fearing discovery before he sho