The objects around him were evidently the merest waste and refuse of a large and varied collection—broken armchairs, dilapidated buffets, old oak-carving in every stage of decay, odd remnants of mildewed and moth-eaten tapestry, fragments of shattered plaster casts; the head of a Diana, crescent crowned, lying amidst the tattered remains of a damask curtain; an armless Apollo, leaning lopsided and despondent of aspect against an odd leaf of a Japanese screen; old pictures whose subjects had long become inscrutable to the eye of man; stray cushions covered with faded embroidery, which had once issued bright and glowing from the fair hands that wrought it—on every side the relics of perished splendour, the very dust and sweepings of goodly dwellings that had long been empty. A melancholy picture, suggestive of man’s decay. Lucille peered into the shadows which filled the angles of the loft, in quest of that oaken cabinet, of which she had but a faint remembrance. ‘It used to stand in the back-parlour in Bond-street when I was a child,’ she said. ‘Yes, I remember, a curious old thing, with the figures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. There are little folding-doors that open the gates of Eden, with the angel and his flaming sword. There are carvings on each side; on one side the expulsion from Paradise, on the other the death of Abel. See, there it is, behind that pile of pictures.’ Lucius looked in the direction she indicated. In the extreme corner of the loft he saw a clumsy cabinet of the early Dutch school, much chipped and battered, with several old frameless canvases propped against it. He clambered over some of the more bulky objects which blockaded his way, cleared a path for Lucille, and after some minutes’ labour they both reached the corner where the cabinet stood. The western light shone full upon this corner. The first task was to remove the pictures, which were thickly coated with dust, and by no means innocent of spiders. Lucille drew back with a shudder and a little girlish scream at the sight of a black and bloated specimen of that tribe. Lucius put aside the pictures one by one. They were of the dingiest school of art, old shopkeepers doubtless, for which Mr. Sivewright had vainly striven to find a customer. Here and there an arm or a head was faintly visible beneath the universal brown of the varnish, but the rest was blank. It was, therefore, with considerable surprise that Lucius perceived beneath this worthless lumber a picture in a frame, and, by the appearance of the canvas, evidently modern. He turned it gently to the light, and saw—What? The face of the man he killed in the pine forest. Happily for Lucius Davoren, he was kneeling on the ground, and with his back to Lucille, when he made this discovery. A cry of surprise, pleasure, terror, he knew not which, broke from her lips as he turned that portrait to the light; but from his there came no sound.