I felt as though I were walking in a dream, so unreal did the whole business seem to me by this time.  I was in a moonlight glamour; the influence of the silver orb was upon me.  Of self-volition I seemed to have little or none left.  I was given over to unseen powers, viewless, that dwell in space, of which we have ordinarily no human cognition.  At such moments as these, and I have gone through many of them, I am no longer the Janet Hope of everyday life.  I am lifted up and beyond my ordinary self.  I obey a law whose beginning and whose ending I am alike ignorant of:  but I feel that it is a law and not an impulse.  I am led blindly forward, but I go unresistingly, feeling that there is no power left in me save that of obeying.

Did I push open the door of the secret room, or was it opened for me by unseen hands?  I know not.  I only know that it closed noiselessly behind me of its own accord and left me standing there wondering, alone, with white face and staring eyes.

The chamber was a large one, or seemed so to me.  It was draped entirely in black, hiding whatever windows there might be.  The polished wood floor was bare.  The ceiling was painted with a number of sprawling Cupids, some of them scattering flowers, others weaving leafy chaplets, presumably to crown the inane-looking goddess reclining in their midst on a bank of impossible cloud.  But both Cupids and goddess were dingy with age, and seemed to have grown too old for such Arcadian revels.

The room was lighted with a dozen large wax candles placed in four silver tripods, each of them about six feet in height, and screwed to the floor to prevent their being overturned.  All these preparations were not without an object.  That object was visible in the middle of the room.  It was a large black coffin studded with silver nails, placed on a black slab about four feet in height, and more than half covered with a large pall.

I felt no fear at sight of this grim object.  I was lifted too far above my ordinary self to be afraid.  I simply wondered—­wondered who lay asleep inside the coffin, and how long he or she had been there.

The only article of furniture in the room was a prie-dieu of black oak.  I knelt on this, and gazed on the coffin, and wondered.  My curiosity urged me to go up to it, and turn down the pall, and ascertain whether the name of the occupant was engraved on the lid.  But stronger than my curiosity was a certain repugnance to go near it which I could not overcome.  That some person was shut up there who during life had been of importance in the world, I could not doubt.  This, too, was the room in which Lady Chillington took her midnight perambulations, and that coffin was the object she came to contemplate.  Perhaps the occupant of the coffin came out, and walked with my lady, and held ghostly converse with her on such occasions.  I fancied that even now I could hear him breathing heavily, and turning over uneasily in his narrow bed.  There seemed a rustling, too, among the folds of the sombre curtains as though someone were in hiding there; and that low faint sobbing sigh which quivered through the room, like an accent of unutterable sorrow, whence did it come?  Others than myself were surely there, though I might not be able to see them.