He led the way across the sacred threshold, looking back, beckoning to them with his wasted old hand, and Mary for the first time in her life entered that house which had seemed to her from her very childhood as a temple of silence and mystery. The passage was dimly lighted by a little lamp on a bracket. The old man crept along stealthily, looking back, with a face full of cunning, till he came to a broad landing, from which an old staircase, with massive oak banisters, led down to the square hall below. The ceilings were low, the passages were narrow. All things in the house were curiously different from that spacious mansion which Lady Maulevrier had built for herself. A door on the landing stood ajar. The old man pushed it open and went in, followed by Mary and her husband. They both expected to see a room humble almost to poverty--an iron bedstead, perhaps, and such furniture as the under servants in a nobleman's household are privileged to enjoy. Both were alike surprised at the luxury of the apartment they entered, and which was evidently reserved exclusively for Steadman's uncle. It was a sitting-room. The furniture was old-fashioned, but almost as handsome as any in Lady Maulevrier's apartments. There was a large sofa of most comfortable shape, covered with dark red velvet, and furnished with pillows and foot rugs, which would have satisfied a Sybarite of the first water. Beside the sofa stood a hookah, with all appliances in the Oriental fashion; and half a dozen long cherry-wood pipes neatly arranged above the mantelpiece showed that Mr. Steadman's uncle was a smoker of a luxurious type. In the centre of the room stood a large writing table, with a case of pigeon-holes at the back, a table which would not have disgraced a Prime Minister's study. A pair of wax candles, in tall silver candlesticks, lighted this table, which was littered with papers, in a wild confusion that too plainly indicated the condition of the owner's mind. The oak floor was covered with Persian prayer rugs, old and faded, but of the richest quality. The window curtains were dark red velvet; and through an open doorway Mary and her husband saw a corresponding luxury in the arrangements of the adjoining bedroom. The whole thing seemed wild and strange as a fairy tale. The weird and wizened old man, grinning and nodding his head at them. The handsome room, rich with dark, subdued colour, in the dim light of four wax candles, two on the table, two on the mantelpiece. The perfume of stephanotis and tea-roses, blended faintly with the all-pervading odour of latakia and Turkish attar. All was alike strange, bearing in mind that this old man was a recipient of Lady Maulevrier's charity, a hanger-on upon a confidential servant, who might be supposed to be generously treated if he had the run of his teeth and the shelter of a decent garret. Verily, there was something regal in such hospitality as this, accorded to a pauper lunatic.