The broken bones of the house projected gaunt and ragged.  Its eyes returned no shine—­they did not even stare, for not a pane of glass was left in a window:  they were but eye-holes, black and blank with shadow and no-ness.  The roofs were gone—­all but that of the great hall, which they had not dared to touch.  She climbed the grand staircase, open to the wind and slippery with ice, and reached her own room.  Snow lay on the floor, which had swollen and burst upwards with November rains.  Through room after room she wandered with a sense of loneliness and desolation and desertion such as never before had she known, even in her worst dreams.  Yet was there to her, in the midst of her sorrow and loss, a strange fascination in the scene.  Such a hive of burning human life now cold and silent!  Even Marquis appeared aware of the change, for with tucked-in tail he went about sadly sniffing, and gazing up and down.  Once indeed, and only once, he turned his face to the heavens, and gave a strange protesting howl, which made Dorothy weep, and a little relieved her oppressed heart.

She would go and see the workshop.  On the way, she would first visit the turret chamber.  But so strangely had destruction altered the look of what it had spared, that it was with difficulty she recognised the doors and ways of the house she had once known so well.  Here was a great hole to the shining snow where once had been a dark corner; there a heap of stones where once had been a carpeted corridor.  All the human look of indwelling had past away.  Where she had been used to go about as if by instinct, she had now to fall back upon memory, and call up again, with an effort sometimes painful in its difficulty, that which had vanished altogether except from the minds of its scattered household.

She found the door of the turret chamber, but that was all she found:  the chamber was gone.  Nothing was there but the blank gap in the wall, and beyond it, far down, the nearly empty moat of the tower.  She turned, frightened and sick at heart, and made her way to the bridge.  That still stood, but the drawbridge above was gone.

She crossed the moat and entered the workshop.  A single glance took in all that was left of the keep.  Not a floor was between her and the sky!  The reservoir, great as a little mountain-tarn, had vanished utterly!  All was cleared out; and the white wintry clouds were sailing over her head.  Nearly a third part of the walls had been brought within a few feet of the ground.  The furnace was gone—­all but its mason-work.  It was like the change of centuries rather than months.  The castle had half-melted away.  Its idea was blotted out, save from the human spirit.  She turned from the workshop, in positive pain of body at the sight, and wandered she hardly knew whither, till she found herself in lady Glamorgan’s parlour.  There was left a single broken chair:  she sat down on it, closed her eyes, and laid back her head.