He laid it back musingly, and opening a door, entered the large room it disclosed. This had been the dining-room. The walls were white, in alternate panels with small oval mirrors whose dust-covered surfaces looked like ground steel. At one end stood a crystal-knobbed mahogany sideboard, holding glass candlesticks in the shape of Ionic columns—above it a quaint portrait of a lady in hoops and love-curls—and at the other end was a [Pg 97]huge fireplace with rust-red fire-dogs and tarnished brass fender. All these, with the round centipede table and the Chippendale chairs set in order against the walls, were dimmed and grayed with a thick powdering of dust. The next room that he entered was big and wide, a place of dark colors, nobly smutched of time. It had been at once library and living-room. Glass-faced book-shelves ran along one side—well-stocked, as the dusty panes showed—and a huge pigeonholed desk glowered in the big bow-window that opened on to what had been the garden. On the wall hung an old map of Virginia. At one side the dark wainscoting yawned to a cavernous fireplace and inglenook with seats in black leather. By it stood a great square tapestry screen, showing a hunting scene, set in a heavy frame. A great leather settee was drawn near the desk and beside this stood a reading-stand with a small china dog and a squat bronze lamp upon it. In contrast to the orderly dining-room there was about this chamber a sense of untouched disorder—a desk-drawer jerked half-open, a yellowed newspaper torn across and flung into a corner, books tossed on desk and lounge, and in the fireplace a little heap of whitened ashes in which charred fragments told of letters and papers burned in haste. A bottle that had once held brandy and a grimy goblet stood [Pg 98]on the desk, and in a metal ash-tray on the reading-stand lay a half-smoked cigar that crumbled to dust in the intruder’s fingers. One by one Valiant forced open the tall French windows, till the fading light lay softly over the austere dignity of the apartment. In that somber room, he knew, had had place whatever was most worthy in the lives of his forebears. The thought of generation upon generation had steeped it in human association.