The room was empty.  He listened, but not a sound came to his ears except the rustling of a curtain in the breeze.  The huge lamp over the table was burning dimly.  The five doors leading from the room were tightly closed.  Nathaniel held his breath, tried to still the tumultuous pounding of his heart as he waited for a sound of life—­a step beyond those doors, a woman’s voice, a child’s cry.  But none came.  The stillness of desertion hovered about him.  He went to one of the five doors.  It was not locked.  He opened it silently, with the caution of a thief, and there loomed before him a chaos of gloom.

“Hello!” he called gently.  “Hello—­Hello—­”

There was no answer.  He struck a match and advanced step by step, holding the yellow bit of flame above his head.  It disclosed the narrow walls of a hall and an open door leading into another room.  The match sputtered and went out and he lighted another.  On a little table just outside the door was a half burned candle and he replaced his match with this.  Then he went in.

At a glance he knew that he had entered a woman’s room, redolent with the perfume of flowers.  On one side was a bed and close beside it a cradle with a child’s toys scattered about it.  The tumbled coverlets showed that both had been recently used.  About the room were thrown articles of wearing apparel; a trunk had been dragged from a closet and was half packed; everywhere was the disorder of hurried flight.  For a few moments the depth of his despair held Nathaniel motionless.  The castle was deserted—­Marion was gone!  He ran back into the great room, no longer trying to still the sound of his footsteps, and opened a second door.  The same silence greeted him, the same disorder, the same evidence that the wives and children of the Mormon king had fled.  He went into a third room—­and then a fourth.

For an instant he paused at the threshold of this fourth chamber.  A light was burning in the room at the end of the hall.  The door was closed with the exception of an inch or two.

“Marion!” he called softly, and listened intently.

He went on when there was no reply, and pushed open the door.

A candle was burning on a stand in front of a mirror.  The room was as empty as the others.  But there was no disorder here.  The bed was unused, the garments in the open closet had not been disarranged.  On the floor beside the bed was a pair of shoes and as Nathaniel saw them his heart seemed to leap to his throat and stifled the cry that was on his lips.  He took one of them in his hand, his whole being throbbing with excitement.  It was Marion’s shoe—­encrusted with mud and torn as he had seen it in the forest.  With her name falling from his lips in a pleading cry he now searched the room and on the stand in front of the mirror he found a lilac colored ribbon, soiled and crumpled.  It was Marion’s ribbon—­the one he had seen last in her hair, and he crushed it to his lips as he ran back into the great room, calling out her name again and again in the torture of helplessness that now possessed him.