Lucille produced a great bunch of rusty keys from the desk at which Mr. Sivewright had been wont to transact the mysterious business of his retirement, and they went up the old staircase side by side in the afternoon sunlight, which had not yet begun to wane. The wide corridor which led to the invalid’s room, with the doors of other rooms on either side of it, was familiar enough to Lucius; but he had never yet ascended above this story, and Lucille had told him that the upper floor was a barren desert—the undisputed territory of mice and spiders. She unlocked a door which opened on a narrow flight of stairs—the steep steps worn by the tread of departed generations, and of various levels. This staircase brought them to the topmost story, above which rose the loft they had to explore. The ceiling of the landing on this upper floor was low, blotched and swollen here and there with the rain of many a winter, the dilapidated roof being in some parts little better than a filter. There were curious old panelled doors on either side of this landing, which was lighted by one melancholy window, across whose narrow panes the spider had woven her cloudy tapestries. ‘Are all those rooms empty?’ asked Lucius, looking at the numerous doors. ‘Yes,’ answered Lucille hurriedly. ‘My grandfather fancied the floors unsafe, and would put nothing into them. Besides, he had room enough down-stairs. The things he has stowed away in the roof are things upon which he sets no value—mere rubbish which almost any one else would have given away. Come, Lucius.’ There was a steep little staircase leading up to the loft, only one degree better than a ladder. This they mounted cautiously in semi-darkness, and then Lucius found himself in a vast substantially floored chamber, just high enough in the clear to admit of his standing upright, and amidst a forest of massive beams leaning this way and that, evidently the roof of a house built to defy the grim destroyer Time. For some moments all was darkness; but while Lucius was striving to pierce the gloom, Lucille raised a sloping shutter in the centre of the roof, and let in a burst of western sunlight. Then he beheld the contents of the place—a chaos of ancient lumber, the wreck of time. It was like standing among the bruised and battered timbers of a sunken vessel at the bottom of the sea.