There was not a sound in the place, and yet those lights might have betokened a great festivity, with pipe and harp going, and dancers’ feet thudding on the floor. At one of the gables there was a low window, and I made for it, thinking it a possible eye to a lobby or passage, and therefore not so hazardous to look in at I crept up and viewed the interior. My window, to my astonishment, looked in on no bare plain lobby, but on a spacious salmanger or hall, very rosy with sconce-light and wood-fire--a hall that extended the whole length of the house, with a bye-ordinar high ceil of black oak carved very handsomely. The walls at the far end were hung with tapestry very like MacCailein’s rooms at home in Inneraora, and down the long sides, whose windows streamed the light upon the hall, great stag-heads glowered with unsleeping eyes, stags of numerous tines. The floor was strewn with the skins of the chase, and on the centre of it was a table laden with an untouched meal, and bottles that winked back the flicker of the candle and the hearth. The comfort of the place, by contrast with our situation, seemed, as I looked hungrily on it through the thick glass of the lozen, more great and tempting than anything ever I saw abroad in the domains of princes. Its air was charged with peace and order; the little puffs and coils and wisps of silver-grey smoke, coming out of the fireplace into the room, took long to swoon into nothingness in that tranquil interior. But the most wonderful thing of all was, that though the supper seemed ready waiting for a company, and could not have been long left, I waited five or ten minutes with my face fast to the pane and no living footstep entered the room. I watched the larger door near the far-off end eagerly; it lay ajar, smiling a welcome to the parts of the house beyond, but no one came in. “Surely they are throng in some other wing,” I thought, “and not so hungry as we, or their viands did not lie so long untouched in that dainty room.” I went round the house at its rear, feeling my way slowly among the bushes. I looked upon parlours and bed-closets, kitchens and corridors; they were lighted with the extravagance of a marriage-night, and as tenantless and silent as the cells of Kilchrist The beds were straightened out, the hearths were swept, the floors were scrubbed, on every hand was the evidence of recent business, but the place was relinquished to the ghosts.