good, and that his old pupil experienced a feeling of satisfaction when the thing was done. Once more we stood together in that state bedroom where Marmaduke had suffered such ghastly terrors when a boy. "Shall I ever forget those nights!" muttered he with a shudder. "Can this room ever be otherwise than hateful to me! It was here, as I sat weak and ill in that arm-chair, that my uncle struck me for losing----. Stay, now I remember it all. Remove this skirting-board, Gilmore; take the poker; do not spare the rotting wood. Ay, there it is." A yellow something lay amid the dust and rubbish, which on inspection turned out to be a gold pencil-case. "That was lent me by my uncle, a dozen years ago," said Marmaduke musing, "and he chastised me for losing it. It had rolled under yonder skirting-board, but I was too terrified at the time to recollect the fact. I wish I could forget things now. Undo the other shutters, Richard. Light, more light." And thus we let the blessed sunlight into all the shuttered rooms. It glanced in galleries on knights in all their panoply, and smote the steel upon their visors, as though the flame of battle once more darted from their eyes; it made their tattered pennons blush again, and tipped their rusted spears with sudden fire. It flashed upon the stern ancestral faces on the wall, and through their dust evoked a look of life. That winter sun had not the power to warm, however; all things struck cold. The dark oak-pannels chilled us from their waveless depths; the cumbrous organ, carved with fruit and flowers, kept frozen silence; while in the chapel, Sir Nicholas in stone and mildew struck to our marrow. His lady opposite, upon her knees in her "devout oratory," gave us cold looks, as though we had interrupted her devotions. In vain the painted windows, high and triple arched, cast down "warm gules" upon her marble breast, and filled the sacred place with glorious hues. In vain the gilded scroll, "Praie for hys Soule," appealed to us through dust and damp, and his memorial pane blushed scarlet in its endeavour to perpetuate his infamy. All things seemed cursed in that accursed house; the hallowed places desecrated, and those where hospitality and good fellowship were meant to reign, solitary and barren. There was one apartment still which had been left by common consent to be visited last of all--Sir Massingberd's oak parlour. There he might have been said to have lived, for it was the only sitting-room he used from early morning--and he was no great sleeper--until very late at night. There, as we have seen, he had held his audiences, and dined, and sometimes slept after any deep debauch. By all the household, except Gilmore, it was held as a Bluebeard's chamber, and would not have been entered upon any account, even had it not had the rector's seal upon it. It was here that the lost baronet had passed his last hours within the house, and thither he had intended to return--if he had meant to return at