"Great Heavens!" he thought, "is it possible that the poor creature escaped from this very house? If so, then she was recaptured and brought back, for here hangs the dress that Mrs. Mason described. My God! what has become of the wearer! Has some fearful fate befallen her?" Echo only answered him as he sat down trembling with excitement. He was here in the room where sweet Lily Lawrence had dragged out weary months of captivity, sickness and sorrow; where her pure cheeks had burned at insult and wrong, where she had suffered the pangs of hunger and cold until her weakened frame had almost succumbed to the grim destroyer, death. But it was silent and deserted now. The dead ashes strewed the hearth, the empty robe hung against the wall, and the cold October wind sighing past the iron-barred window did not whisper of the tender heart that had ached so drearily within. "This has been a prison for some poor soul," Mr. Shelton said aloud as he noticed the iron bars that guarded the window. He went out shuddering as if with cold, and advanced to the next room. The door was locked, but the key had been left upon the outside. He turned it hastily and stepped over the threshold, half-expecting to find some poor creature incarcerated within. But silence and gloom greeted him here also. The room was bare and dreary as the ones he had quitted. A bed and a chair comprised its furniture, and heavy bars of iron secured the solitary window. "What a horrible prison house," he exclaimed. "And what dreadful deeds of darkness have perhaps been committed within these old walls." He went to the window and peered out through the heavy bars at the tangled garden. It was faded and dying now, and the russet leaves of autumn strewed the deserted paths. "My God, what was that?" he exclaimed with a violent start. A strange sound had grated upon his ears--the distinct clank of a heavy chain and the smothered moan of a human voice. Involuntarily he looked downward and saw a trap-door in the middle of the room. "Now some new discovery of human misery," thought the detective as he advanced and pushed the sliding door backward. A dark and narrow stairway was disclosed. He descended it quickly and entered the empty room beyond. A feeling of disappointment struck him as he entered the deserted, cobwebbed dungeon, but guided by the sound of faint, low moans he advanced across the floor and opened the opposite door to the one by which he had entered. Here he paused and swept his hand across his brow, as though to dispel a mist that had risen before his shrinking vision. There before his eyes, extended on her low cot bed, with the horrible strap and chain about her waist fastened to the iron staple in the floor, with her hungry black eyes glaring on him from her skeleton face, lay poor Fanny Colville in all her abject wretchedness. "My God!" exclaimed Mr. Shelton, "horrors upon horrors accumulate!" CHAPTER XXVI.