Now we had taken refuge in the porch of that half that lay uppermost on the slope; and here we noticed that, at a late date, the building was seemingly in process of repair, painters’ pots and brushes lying on a window-sill, and a pair of steps showing within through the glass.

“They have gone to dinner,” said I.  “Supposing we seize the opportunity to explore?”

We pushed at the door; it yielded.  We entered, shut ourselves in, and paused to the sound of our own footsteps echoing and laughing from corners and high places.  On the ground floor were two or three good-sized rooms with modern grates, but cornices, chimney-pieces, embrasures finely Jacobean.  There were innumerable under-stair and over-head cupboards, too, and pantries, and closets, and passages going off darkly into the unknown.

We clomb the stairway—­to the first floor—­to the second.  Here was all pure Jacobean; but the walls were crumbling, the paper peeling, the windows dim and foul with dirt.

I have never known a place with such echoes.  They shook from a footstep like nuts rattling out of a bag; a mouse behind the skirting led a whole camp-following of them; to ask a question was, as in that other House, to awaken the derisive shouts of an Opposition.  Yet, in the intervals of silence, there fell a deadliness of quiet that was quite appalling by force of contrast.

“Let us go down,” I said.  “I am feeling creepy.”

“Pooh!” said William Tyrwhitt; “I could take up my abode here with a feather bed.”

We descended, nevertheless.  Arrived at the ground floor, “I am going to the back,” said William.

I followed him—­a little reluctantly, I confess.  Gloom and shadow had fallen upon the town, and this old deserted hulk of an abode was ghostly to a degree.  There was no film of dust on its every shelf or sill that did not seem to me to bear the impress of some phantom finger feeling its way along.  A glint of stealthy eyes would look from dark uncertain corners; a thin evil vapour appear to rise through the cracks of the boards from the unvisited cellars in the basement.

And here, too, we came suddenly upon an eccentricity of out-building that wrought upon our souls with wonder.  For, penetrating to the rear through what might have been a cloak-closet or butler’s pantry, we found a supplementary wing, or rather tail of rooms, loosely knocked together, to proceed from the back, forming a sort of skilling to the main building.  These rooms led direct into one another, and, consisting of little more than timber and plaster, were in a woeful state of dilapidation.  Everywhere the laths grinned through torn gaps in the ceilings and walls; everywhere the latter were blotched and mildewed with damp, and the floor-boards rotting in their tracks.  Fallen mortar, rusty tins, yellow teeth of glass, whitened soot—­all the decay and rubbish of a generation of neglect littered the place and filled it with an acrid odour.  From one of the rooms we looked forth through a little discoloured window upon a patch of forlorn weedy garden, where the very cats glowered in a depression that no surfeit of mice could assuage.