That same iron-clamped door atop of the tower staircase opened--if indeed one may so speak of a door which so rarely was put to its use--into a chamber called the Warder's Room. Not having been inhabited for a generation or two, it was of course reputed to be haunted by a "White Woman," and that was no more than truth and fact; for many an hour Ruth spent in it, weaving romances out of her own brain, for the mail-clad knights and wimpled ladies whose pictured forms gleamed dimly from the rich oak wainscoted walls, and the designs and quaint devices of their panellings which accorded with those on the walls of Ruth's room, lying immediately beyond. [Sidenote: Ruth romancing.] Ruth had a theory that this suite of rooms on the upper storey of the gatehouse wing had in olden times been occupied by the lord and lady of the ancient mansion; and the notion was probably a correct one, since in no part of the place were traces of such magnificence to be seen as here. Fragments of painted glass glowed in the mullioned windows, showing scraps of monstrous griffin-like heads and scaly tails, and enscrolled letters, of which only one word in one of the upper lights of Ruth's window remained entire--"Loyaulté." Time and wear had so polished the wood of this chamber's richly-parqueted floor that its smooth surface reflected, like some quiet pool, the tall-backed chairs of tawny and gilt Cordovan leather, ranged stiffly against the walls, and about the long narrow oaken table covered with its faded velvet drapery; and the massive proportions of the huge carved oaken chest, capacious enough to shut in one of the mailed knights, or even portly brown-frocked Abbot Benedict Ogard of Waltham Abbey himself, who smiled, come fair weather come foul, come day come night, so unctuously down on you from his recess beside the loftily-coped fireplace. Ruth could very well recall the time when the lower portion of the walls of this room had been hung with Flemish tapestry, embroidered with subjects from the Old Testament and early Grecian lore. One winter, however, when King Frost intruded so tyrannically in-doors that people shivered in their beds, Maudlin Sweetapple had stripped down the greater part of this tapestry to make curtains for Ruth's room. If in cutting away the tattered and hopelessly unmendable parts of it, she had patched the stuff together again in such fashion as to leave Solomon in all his glory turning a summersault on the extreme tip of Jonah's whale's nose, and Goliath's gory head frowned grimly from the neck of the Trojan horse, did it not all serve every whit as well for keeping the wind away? [Sidenote: The warder's room.]