Here the carriage stopped, and one of the attendants, dismounting, rang a hall bell, whose deep sudden peal through empty vastness gave a character of profound desolation to the silence in which it was swallowed. More than once the summons was repeated, and at last a faint light gleamed upon the windows, and the door was timorously unbarred and opened. A hard-featured hag, in a faded suit of an obsolete fashion--the _genius loci_--received the party. She scrutinized Lucille with a protracted stare of audacious inquisitiveness, and when she had quite satisfied her curiosity, she led the way through several halls and lobbies up the great staircase, along a corridor, through a suite of rooms, upon another lobby up a second staircase, into a great dreary passage, through half a dozen waste and desolate chambers, and so at last into a room which had a few pieces of furniture at one end of it, and a log of wood smouldering and smoking on the hearth. In truth it was a melancholy place, haunted by dismal reverberations and a deathlike atmosphere--everywhere mildewed, faded, and half rotten with decay. It was a place where crimes might be committed, unrecorded and unsuspected--where screams would lose themselves in vacancy, and desolation and solitude would swallow up the ghastly evidences of outrage. Here was the fitting scenery for tales of preternatural terror or fiendish crime. Lucille felt her heart sink within her as she entered this vast and awful labyrinth. But she felt that, be her destiny what it might, she had herself no power to mend it. What resource was left to her? Necessity retained her amidst the menacing solitudes of this half-ruined mansion. Blassemare left her to the care of the old crone, who, to judge from appearances, was hardly an improvement upon the ungracious attendant she had left at the Chateau des Anges. This hag had evidently the worst possible opinion of her guest, and took no pains to affect a respect which she was far from feeling. She contented herself with offering Lucille some supper, and this declined, showed her the bedroom that was prepared for her--a room of the same depressing vastness, and offering, in its shabby and niggard furniture, a contrast to its majestic dimensions. Such as it was, however, it was welcome. Lucille was exhausted with the anxieties and agitations of the day, as well as with her late and rapid journey. Having examined the room with a fearful scrutiny, she succeeded in bolting one of the doors, and placed the only chair the room contained against the other; so that she might, at least, be warned by the noise, in the event of any persons forcing an entrance. She lay down without taking off her clothes, and leaving the candle unextinguished.