There were two articles in the room, however, which were peculiar to itself. The one was a human skull--to all appearance, the same as all other skulls, the virtue of which has gone out of them, though it had once belonged to no common man. The second object could still less be termed an ornament than the first, although it was a picture. It depicted a woman of frightful aspect, having but one eye, and a hare-lip; she was standing up, and appeared to be declaiming or dictating; while an old cripple, at a table beside her, took down her words in writing. If you had gone all over the rest of the house--and it was a large one--you would have found nothing else remarkable, or which did not smack of Bloomsbury. It was, indeed, nothing but a lodging-house, and the room we have described was the private apartment of its mistress. She might consult her own private taste, she considered, in her own room, else the skull and the picture occasionally rather shocked "the daintier sense" of the new lodgers, to whom the landlady gave audience in this apartment. She is as little like a lodging-house keeper, to look at, as can be imagined. Her cheeks are firm and fresh-colored, her teeth white and shining, her eyes quite bright, and her hands plump. To one who knows her age, as we do--she is fifty-three--she looks like an old woman who has found out the secret of perpetual youth, but has kept it for her own use, as, in such a case, every woman probably would do. There is only one piece of deception in her appearance; her black hair, which clusters over her forehead like a girl's, is dyed of that color: it is in reality as white as snow. By lamp-light, as you see her now, she might be a woman of five-and-twenty, penning a letter to her love. But she is, in fact, writing to her son; for it is Mrs. Yorke. Writing to him, but not thinking of him, surely, when she frowns as now, and leans back in her chair with that menacing and angry look. No; her anger is not directed against _him_, although he has left her and home, long since, upon an adventure of which she disapproved. "You will gain nothing for yourself, Richard," was her warning; "and, perhaps, may wreck even _my_ scanty fortunes." But, as we know, her son had taken his own way (as he was wont to do), and had so far prospered. She was writing a reply to the letter she had received from him from Crompton that very morning, and the task was one that naturally evoked some bitter memories.