in a tone half
soothing and half dignified, if they could inform him how to obtain
admittance or how to arouse the inhabitants.

An old crone, leaning out of an opposite window, with matted hair
hanging over a begrimed and shrivelled countenance, made answer. "No
one," she said, in her peculiar dialect, which the worthy man scarcely
comprehended, "lived there or had done so for years:" but Brown knew
better; and while he was asserting the fact, a girl put her head out of
another hovel, and said that she had sometimes seen, at the dusk of the
evening, a man leave the house, but whether any one else lived in it
she could not tell. Again Mr. Brown sounded an alarm, but no answer came
forth, and in great fear and trembling he applied violent hands to
the door: it required but little force; it gave way; he entered; and,
jealous of the entrance of the mob without, reclosed and barred, as well
as he was able, the shattered door. The house was unnaturally large
for the neighbourhood, and Brown was in doubt whether first to ascend a
broken and perilous staircase or search the rooms below: he decided on
the latter; he found no one, and with a misgiving heart, which nothing
but the recollection of the great Turkey carpet could have inspired, he
ascended the quaking steps. All was silent. But a door was unclosed. He
entered, and saw the object of his search before him.

Over a pallet bent a form, on which, though youth seemed withered and
even pride broken, the unconquerable soul left somewhat of grace and of
glory, that sustained the beholder's remembrance of better days; a child
in its first infancy knelt on the nearer side of the bed with clasped
hands, and vacant eyes that turned towards the intruder with a listless
and lacklustre gaze. But Glendower, or rather Mordaunt, as he bent over
the pallet, spoke not, moved not: his eyes were riveted on one object;
his heart seemed turned into stone and his veins curdled into ice. Awed
and chilled by the breathing desolation of the spot, Brown approached,
and spoke he scarcely knew what. "You are," he concluded his address,
"the master of Mordaunt Court;" and he placed the letter in the hands of
the person he thus greeted.

"Awake, hear me!" cried Algernon to Isabel, as she lay extended on the
couch; and the messenger of glad tidings, for the first time seeing her
countenance, shuddered, and knew that he was in the chamber of death.

"Awake, my own, own love! Happy days are in store