It was always kept locked, too, although the key was not taken away but left outside the door; and all the servants, from Mrs. Benson downwards, had a superstitious dread of entering it. How, then, account for the noise he had heard, which certainly came from that room and from no other? With such thoughts in his mind, to sleep again, for some time to come, was out of the question. A quarter of an hour, or it might be twenty minutes, passed thus, and the silence was still unbroken. Then there came a sound, and Lionel started involuntarily as he heard it. It was the faint sound of footsteps—the noise made by some one moving slowly and cautiously across the floor of the room above. It was so faint, so muffled, so subdued, that at any other time than the middle of the night, and to any ears less keen than those now listening with all their might, it would have been altogether inaudible. If, for a moment, he had shivered at the recollection that it was in that very room his uncle had breathed his last—if, for a moment, some vague ghostly fancies had flitted across his mind, it was for a moment only. Involuntarily, and without any consciousness on his part, his mind seemed, in some strange way, to connect the dim half-seen figure that had melted before his eyes into the shrubbery, with the mysterious footsteps overhead. It was the work of a very short time for Lionel to slip out of bed, light his candle, and partially dress himself. He had no weapon of any kind in his room, but, man against man, he was not afraid of any one; and that there was more than one person upstairs seemed highly improbable. He opened his room door as noiselessly as possible, and stole out into the corridor. He had to traverse one long passage, ascend a flight of stairs, and there, at the end of another passage, was the door of the room he was in quest of. It was the state bedroom of the house, this room called the Griffin. None of the rooms near it were occupied: the servants all slept in the opposite wing. Had Lionel slept in his own room that night, the unknown intruder would have had one whole wing of Park Newton entirely to himself—a fact that was probably well-known and calculated upon. Along the chilly corridor and up the oaken staircase, lighted candle in hand, stole Lionel step by step, slowly and without noise. At the top of the staircase he paused and listened. Two or three minutes passed in silence the most profound. Had not his senses deceived him? he asked himself. Was it, indeed, the sound of mortal footsteps that he had heard? or nothing more than some of the vague, unaccountable noises, born of night and the darkness—moans, whispers, the creaking of doors, the rustling of ghostly garments—such as may be heard during the mute hours of sleep in any old house in which several generations of people have lived and died?