For journey the shortest distance may seem when every inch means a heart-throb and one grows old in traversing a foot.  At first the way was easy; she had but to crawl up a slight incline with the comforting consciousness that two people were within reach of her voice, almost within sound of her beating heart.  But presently she came to a turn, beyond which her fingers failed to reach any wall on her left.  Then came a step up which she stumbled, and farther on a short flight, each tread of which she had been told to test before she ventured to climb it, lest the decay of innumerable years should have weakened the wood too much to bear her weight.  One, two, three, four, five steps!  Then a landing with an open space beyond.  Half of her journey was done.  Here she felt she could give a minute to drawing her breath naturally, if the air, unchanged in years, would allow her to do so.  Besides, here she had been enjoined to do a certain thing and to do it according to instructions.  Three matches had been given her and a little night candle.  Denied all light up to now, it was at this point she was to light her candle and place it on the floor, so that in returning she should not miss the staircase and get a fall.  She had promised to do this, and was only too happy to see a spark of light scintillate into life in the immeasurable darkness.

She was now in a great room long closed to the world, where once officers in Colonial wars had feasted, and more than one council had been held.  A room, too, which had seen more than one tragic happening, as its almost unparalleled isolation proclaimed.  So much Mr. Van Broecklyn had told her; but she was warned to be careful in traversing it and not upon any pretext to swerve aside from the right-hand wall till she came to a huge mantelpiece.  This passed, and a sharp corner turned, she ought to see somewhere in the dim spaces before her a streak of vivid light shining through the crack at the bottom of the blocked-up door.  The paper should be somewhere near this streak.

All simple, all easy of accomplishment, if only that streak of light were all she was likely to see or think of.  If the horror which was gripping her throat should not take shape!  If things would remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness, and not force themselves in shadowy suggestion upon her excited fancy!  But the blackness of the passage-way through which she had just struggled was not to be found here.  Whether it was the effect of that small flame flickering at the top of the staircase behind her, or of some change in her own powers of seeing, surely there was a difference in her present outlook.  Tall shapes were becoming visible—­the air was no longer blank—­she could see—­Then suddenly she saw why.  In the wall high up on her right was a window.  It was small and all but invisible, being covered on the outside with vines, and on the inside with the cobwebs of a century.  But some small gleams from the star-light night came through, making phantasms out of ordinary things, which unseen were horrible enough, and half seen choked her heart with terror.