A key in a lock turned, and a door close at hand grated on its hinges. "Wait till I light a match," said Roger's welcome voice. The match made a tawny blur the shape of a doorway, and she had time to reach it before it flickered out. Roger drew her into the house, and closed the door. CHAPTER XXIX "There's no smoke in the chimney, And the rain beats on the floor; There's no glass in the window, There's no wood in the door; The heather grows behind the house, And the sand lies before. No hand hath trained the ivy, The walls are gray and bare; The boats upon the sea sail by, Nor ever tarry there; No beast of the field comes nigh, Nor any bird of the air." MARY COLERIDGE. It was black dark inside the house, instead of the white darkness outside. Knocking Annette carefully against pieces of furniture, Roger guided her down a narrow passage into what felt like a room. Near the ceiling were two bars of white where the fog looked in over the tops of the shutters. He struck another match, and a little chamber revealed itself, with faded carpet and a long mirror. But no sooner was it seen than it was gone. "Did you see that chair near you?" said Roger. "I haven't many matches left." "There is a candle on the mantelpiece," she said. Roger was amazed at Annette's cleverness. He had not seen it himself, but she had. He exulted in the thought. He lit it, and the poor little tall drawing-room came reluctantly into view, with its tarnished mirror from which the quicksilver had ebbed, and its flowered wall-paper over which the damp had scrawled its own irregular patterns. The furniture was of the kind that expresses only one idea and that a bad one. The foolish sofa, with a walnut backbone showing through a slit in its chintz cover, had a humped excrescence at one end like an uneasy chair, and the other four chairs had servilely imitated this hump, and sunk their individuality, if they ever had any, to be "a walnut suite." A glass-fronted chiffonier had done its horrid best to "be in keeping" with the suite. On the walls were a few prints of race-horses stretched out towards a winning-post; and steel engravings of the Emperor of the French in an order and the Empress Eugénie all smiles and ringlets served as pendants to two engravings of stags by Landseer. Annette took off Roger's coat and laid it on a chair. "Some one has been very unhappy here," she said, below her breath. Roger did not hear her. He was drawing together the litter of waste-paper in the grate. And then--careful man!--having ascertained with the poker that the register was open, he set a light to it. The dancing, garish firelight made the sense of desolation acute. "Who lived here?" said Annette. Roger hesitated a moment, and then said-- "A Mrs. Deane." "Was she very old?" "Not very--not more than twenty-seven." "And is she dead?"