It appeared to Richard that he was nearly a year reaching the little back yard of the lonely house.  He slipped into the scullery and locked the door, wondering if his movements had been observed since he quitted the main street.  Here he drew a long breath and looked around him; then he began wandering restlessly through the rooms, of which there were five or six on the ground-floor.  The furniture, the carpets, and all the sordid fixtures of the house were just as Richard had known them in his childhood.  Everything was unchanged, even to the faded peacock-feather stuck over the parlor looking-glass.  As he regarded the familiar objects and breathed the snuffy atmosphere peculiar to the place, the past rose so vividly before him that he would scarcely have been startled if a lean, gray old man had suddenly appeared in one of the doorways.  On a peg in the front hall hung his cousin’s napless beaver hat, satirically ready to be put on; in the kitchen closet a pair of ancient shoes, worn down at the heel and with taps on the toe, had all the air of intending to step forth.  The shoes had been carefully blacked, but a thin skin of mould had gathered over them.  They looked like Lemuel Shackford.  They had taken a position habitual with him.  Richard was struck by the subtile irony which lay in these inanimate things.  That a man’s hat should outlast the man, and have a jaunty expression of triumph!  That a dead man’s shoes should mimic him!

The tall eight-day clock on the landing had run down.  It had stopped at twelve, and it now stood with solemnly uplifted finger, as if imposing silence on those small, unconsidered noises which commonly creep out, like mice, only at midnight.  The house was full of such stealthy sounds.  The stairs creaked at intervals, mysteriously, as if under the weight of some heavy person ascending.  Now and then the woodwork stretched itself with a snap, as though it had grown stiff in the joints with remaining so long in one position.  At times there were muffled reverberations of footfalls on the flooring overhead.  Richard had a curious consciousness of not being alone, but of moving in the midst of an invisible throng of persons who elbowed him softly and breathed in his face, and vaguely impressed themselves upon him as being former occupants of the premises.  This populous solitude, this silence with its busy interruptions, grew insupportable as he passed from room to room.

One chamber he did not enter,—­the chamber in which his cousin’s body was found that Wednesday morning.  In Richard’s imagination it was still lying there, white and piteous, by the hearth.  He paused at the threshold and glanced in; then turned abruptly and mounted the staircase.