the eighteenth century, by the chief of a great family, from whose latest representative, his mother’s first cousin, Edmund Melrose had now inherited it.  Nothing could be more curious than its subsequent history.  For it was no sooner finished, in a pure Georgian style, and lavishly incrusted in all its principal rooms with graceful decoration, than the man who built it died.  His descendants, who had plenty of houses in more southern and populous regions, turned their backs upon the Tower, refused to live in it, and, failing to find a tenant of the gentry class, let part of it to the farmer, and put in a gardener as caretaker.  Yet a certain small sum had always been allowed for keeping it in repair, and it was only within the last few years that dilapidation had made head.

Melrose took up the lamp, and carried it once more through the ground-floor of the Tower.  Save for the dying fires, and the sputtering lamp, everything was dark and still in the spacious house.  The storm was dying down in fitful gusts that seemed at intervals to invade the shadowy spaces of the corridor, driving before them the wisps of straw and paper that had been left here and there by the unpacking of the great writing-table.  There could be no ghosts in the house, for nothing but a fraction of it had ever sheltered life; yet from its architectural beauty there breathed a kind of dumb, human protest against the disorderly ill-treatment to which it had been subjected.

In spite of his excitement and pre-occupation, Melrose felt it, and presently he turned abruptly, and went upstairs, still carrying the lamp; through the broad upper passage answering to the corridor below, where doors in deep recesses, each with its classical architrave, and its carved lintels, opened from either side.  The farthest door on the right he had been shown as that of his wife’s room; he opened one nearer, and let himself into his dressing-room, where Anastasia had taken care to light the fire, which no north country-woman would have thought of lighting for a mere man.

Putting the lamp down in the dressing-room, he pushed open his wife’s door, and looked in.  She was apparently asleep, and the child beside her.  The room struck cold, and, by a candle in a basin, he saw that it was littered from end to end with the contents of two or three trunks that were standing open.  The furniture was no less scanty and poor than in the sitting-rooms, and the high panelled walls closing in upon the bed gave a dungeonlike aspect to the room.

A momentary pity for his wife, brought to this harsh Cumbrian spot, from the flowers and sun, the Bacchic laughter and colour of a Tuscan vintage, shot through Melrose.  But his will silenced it.  “She will get used to it,” he said to himself again, with dry determination.  Then he turned on his heel.  The untidiness of his wife’s room, her lack of method and charm, and the memory of her peevishness on the journey disgusted him.  There was a bed in his dressing-room; and he was soon soundly asleep there.