enty years that Benjamin Corvet had
lived alone here.

Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer to
him; they gave him a little of the feeling he had been unable to get
when he looked at his father's picture. He could realize better now
the lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill,
taking up for distraction one subject of study after another,
exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it engross him,
and then absorbing himself in the next.

These two rooms evidently had been the ones most used by his father;
the other rooms on this floor, as Alan went into them one by one, he
found spoke far less intimately of Benjamin Corvet. A dining-room was
in the front of the house to the north side of the hall; a service room
opened from it, and on the other side of the service room was what
appeared to be a smaller dining-room. The service room communicated
both by dumb waiter and stairway with rooms below; Alan went down the
stairway only far enough to see that the rooms below were servants'
quarters; then he came back, turned out the light on the first floor,
struck another match, and went up the stairs to the second story.

The rooms opening on to the upper hall, it was plain to him, though
their doors were closed, were mostly bedrooms. He put his hand at
hazard on the nearest door and opened it. As he caught the taste and
smell of the air in the room--heavy, colder, and deader even than the
air in the rest of the house--he hesitated; then with his match he
found the light switch.

The room and the next one which communicated with it evidently were--or
had been--a woman's bedroom and boudoir. The hangings, which were
still swaying from the opening of the door, had taken permanently the
folds in which they had hung for many years; there were the scores of
long-time idleness, not of use, in the rugs and upholstery of the
chairs. The bed, however, was freshly made up, as though the bed
clothing had been changed occasionally. Alan went through the bedroom
to the door of the boudoir, and saw that that too had the same look of
unoccupancy and disuse. On the low dressing table were scattered such
articles as a woman starting on a journey might think it not worth
while to take with her. There was no doubt that these were the rooms
of his father's wife.

Had his father preserved them thus, as she had left them, in the hope
that she might come back, permitting himse