Our first thought was for a light.  The same laborious investigation that had landed us where we were, revealed that the house was lighted by electricity, and that the plant was not in operation.  By accident I stumbled across a tabouret with smoking materials, and found a half dozen matches.  The first one showed us the magnitude of the room we stood in, and revealed also a brass candle-stick by the open fireplace, a candle-stick almost four feet high, supporting a candle of similar colossal proportions.  It was Hotchkiss who discovered that it had been recently lighted.  He held the match to it and peered at it over his glasses.

“Within ten minutes,” he announced impressively, “this candle has been burning.  Look at the wax!  And the wick!  Both soft.”

“Perhaps it’s the damp weather,” I ventured, moving a little nearer to the circle of light.  A gust of wind came in just then, and the flame turned over on its side and threatened demise.  There was something almost ridiculous in the haste with which we put down the window and nursed the flicker to life.

The peculiarly ghost-like appearance of the room added to the uncanniness of the situation.  The furniture was swathed in white covers for the winter; even the pictures wore shrouds.  And in a niche between two windows a bust on a pedestal, similarly wrapped, one arm extended under its winding sheet, made a most life-like ghost, if any ghost can be life-like.

In the light of the candle we surveyed each other, and we were objects for mirth.  Hotchkiss was taking off his sodden shoes and preparing to make himself comfortable, while I hung my muddy raincoat over the ghost in the corner.  Thus habited, he presented a rakish but distinctly more comfortable appearance.

“When these people built,” Hotchkiss said, surveying the huge dimensions of the room, “they must have bought a mountain and built all over it.  What a room!”

It seemed to be a living-room, although Hotchkiss remarked that it was much more like a dead one.  It was probably fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide.  It was very high, too, with a domed ceiling, and a gallery ran around the entire room, about fifteen feet above the floor.  The candle light did not penetrate beyond the dim outlines of the gallery rail, but I fancied the wall there hung with smaller pictures.

Hotchkiss had discovered a fire laid in the enormous fireplace, and in a few minutes we were steaming before a cheerful blaze.  Within the radius of its light and heat, we were comfortable again.  But the brightness merely emphasized the gloom of the ghostly corners.  We talked in subdued tones, and I smoked, a box of Russian cigarettes which I found in a table drawer.  We had decided to stay all night, there being nothing else to do.  I suggested a game of double-dummy bridge, but did not urge it when my companion asked me if it resembled euchre.  Gradually, as the ecclesiastical candle paled in the firelight, we grew drowsy.  I drew a divan into the cheerful area, and stretched myself out for sleep.  Hotchkiss, who said the pain in his leg made him wakeful, sat wide-eyed by the fire, smoking a pipe.