This was, then, the Gables, this great old-fashioned gloomy house, with a broad portico supported on fluted granite pillars, facing the broad park dotted with clumps of trees, so broad and so far-reaching that the deer in the furthermost parts were reduced to moving specks. The door was opened by an ill-looking servant-maid, whose sour and crabbed face struck an unpleasant note against the old-fashioned and romantic surroundings. The great hall, oak-panelled, and lit by stained glass windows, hid amongst its other treasures an echo, whose dreamy voice repeated my footsteps with a sound like the pattering of a ghost. I stood for a moment, my heart absorbing the silence of this place, so far removed from the spirit of to-day. The air held something, I know not what, it seemed like an odour left from the perfumed robes of Romance. I heard a sound behind me, and turning, I saw an old servant man with silvery white hair. He showed me to my room, and I kept him whilst I explained fully my business. He listened respectfully, but like a person who had ceased to take any interest in life. When I had finished, I asked him to take me to the room where the dead person lay. He led the way down a corridor, opened a door, and stood aside whilst I entered. I found myself in a bedroom hung with rose-coloured silk; the window was open, and through it came the warm evening breeze and the far-off cawing of rooks. On the bed I saw a form, but I could scarcely believe that what I saw was real. Stretched upon the snow-white coverlet lay the body of a cavalier, full-dressed in amber satin doublet and long buff-coloured riding-boots, his hair long, curling, and black as night, surrounded a face pale as marble and beautiful as a woman's. His white right hand, peeping from its lace ruffle, grasped the hilt of a sword, his left hand grasped a silver trumpet. Attached to the trumpet a crimson silk cord streaked the coverlet like a thin and tortuous stream of blood. He seemed to have stepped from the pages of romance, and to have laid himself down here to rest. I trembled as I looked, feared to stir lest he should wake, yet I well knew him to be dead. I might have fancied myself in a dream but for the far-off clamour of the rooks coming through the evening sky outside and the sound of my own heart beating. Was it a man? was it a woman? the face might have done for either, yet it was the most beautiful face I had ever beheld, the most romantic, the most pathetic. Then recollection woke up, and I shuddered. This, then, was Sir Gerald Wilder. This form, more beautiful than a picture, was the sorrow of James Wilder, the thing that had driven him to opium, the thing that had broken his heart and crowned him with premature old age. How? Why? I dared scarcely think. I stole from the room. In the passage I found the old man-servant waiting for me; he shut the door softly, and I followed him back to my own room. There I took his arm and looked in his face.