There was a secretary in this room and before it he spent most of the remaining time. Some old letters which he found there engrossed him completely, and from one small drawer he took an object that interested him so much he failed to replace it on leaving the room. It was the faded miniature of a pale young mother and a blue-eyed babe. The mother had the look of the Lawrence family, and the child the promise of that saucy and irresponsible loveliness he had seen the day before in the new-made heiress, Polly Earle. This was not all he carried away. After he had finished the letters, he sat a long time musing with knitted brows and rigid hands, then he examined the desk, and sounding it, listened with accustomed ear to the echo made by his knuckles on the various partitions. Suddenly he stopped, and leaning over a certain receptacle, from which he had drawn a small drawer, he tapped again, and seeming to be satisfied with the result, began to manipulate the place with his penknife till the false bottom came out and he found in the shallow space thus disclosed a small box which he eagerly pulled out, opened, and examined. What it held I do not know, but whatever it was, he thrust it with a triumphant look into his breast, and then repairing the mischief he had done, first closed the drawers and then the desk, shaking visibly as he did so, perhaps with something of the feeling of a thief, though his face had none of the aspects of one, and his step when he moved away had a resolution in it that added height to his stature, which since he had allowed himself to walk upright was imposing. In another moment he had carried the lantern from the room, and the sleep of years had descended again upon its dark and silent precincts. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VI. THE PORTRAIT. HAD the sides of this house suddenly fallen in and revealed to the distant neighbors at the foot of the hill the vision of this creeping marauder passing through the haunted rooms and down the creaking staircases of this long-unopened house, what a panic of fear would have swept through them at the uncanny sight! Glints of light from the small lantern which he carried, passed flickering from wall to wall, and on one window-shade threw an exaggerated outline of his form with its long beard and groping hand, which if seen from without would have sent most persons hurrying down the road. But there was no one in the fields that night, and this passing glimpse of the intruder went out in darkness without any other alarm being given than that which came from the creaking pines and pollards without.