All shapes, all hues, all odours, and all sounds,
Pass, as the flushings of the rainy bow
Fade in the vast and all-insphering air.

THE DEAD SECRET.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST. THE MYRTLE ROOM.

A BROAD, square window, with small panes
and dark sashes; dreary yellow light,
glimmering through the dirt of half a century,
crusted on the glass; purer rays striking
across the dimness through the fissures of
three broken panes; dust floating upward,
pouring downward, rolling smoothly round
and round in the still atmosphere; lofty,
bare, faded red walls; chairs in confusion,
tables placed awry; a tall black bookcase
with an open door half dropping from its
hinges; a pedestal, with a broken bust lying
in fragments at its feet; a ceiling darkened
by stains, a floor whitened by dust; such
was the aspect of the Myrtle Boom when
Rosamond first entered it, leading her
husband by the hand.

After passing the doorway, she slowly
advanced a few steps, and then stopped, waiting
with every sense on the watch, with every
faculty strung up to the highest pitch of
expectation waiting in the ominous stillness,
in the forlorn solitude, for the vague
Something which the room might contain, which
might rise visibly before her, which might
sound audibly behind her, which might touch
her on a sudden from above, from below,
from either side. A minute, or more, she
breathlessly waited; and nothing appeared,
nothing sounded, nothing touched her. The
silence and the solitude had their secret to
keep, and kept it.

She looked round at her husband. His
face, so quiet and composed at other times,
expressed doubt and uneasiness now. His
disengaged hand was outstretched, and moving
backwards and forwards and up and down,
in the vain attempt to touch something
which might enable him to guess at the
position in which he was placed. His look
and action, as he stood in that new and
strange sphere, the mute appeal that he made
so sadly and so unconsciously to his wife's
loving help, restored Rosamond's self-possession
by recalling her heart to the dearest of
all its interests, to the holiest of all its cares.
Her eyes, fixed so distrustfully, but the moment
before, on the dreary spectacle of neglect and
ruin which spread around them, turned fondly
to her husband's face, radiant with the
unfathomable brightness of pity and love. She
bent quickly across him, caught his
outstretched arm, and pressed it to his side.

"Don't do that, darling." she said, gently;
"I don't like to see it. It looks as if you had
forgotten that I was with you—as if you
were left alone and helpless. What need
have you of your sense of touch, when you
have got me? Did you hear me open the
door, Lenny? Do you know that we are in
the Myrtle Room?"

"What did you see, Rosamond, when you
opened the door? What do you see now?"
He asked those questions rapidly and eagerly,
in a whisper.

"Nothing but dust and dirt and desolation.
The loneliest moor in Cornwall is not
so lonely-looking as this room; but there is
nothing to alarm us, nothing (except one's
own fancy) that suggests an idea of danger
of any kind."

"What made you so long before you spoke
to me, Rosamond?" .

"I was frightened, love, on first entering
the room—not at what I saw, but at my own
fanciful ideas of what I might see. I was
child enough to be afraid of something starting
out of the walls, or of something rising
through the floor; in short, of I hardly know
what. I have got over those fears, Lenny,
but a certain distrust of the room still clings
to me. Do you feel it?"

"I feel something like it," he replied
uneasily. "I feel as if the night that is always
before my eyes was darker to me in this place
than in any other. Where are we standing
now?"

''Just inside the door."

"Does the floor look safe to walk on?"
He tried it suspiciously with his foot as he
put the question.

"Quite safe," replied Rosamond. "It would
never support the furniture that is on it, if
it was so rotten as to be dangerous. Come
across the room with me, and try it." With
those words she led him slowly to the
window.

"The air seems as if it was nearer to me,"
he said, bending his face forward towards
the lowest of the broken panes. "What is
before us now?"

She told him, describing minutely the size
and appearance of the window. He turned
from it carelessly, as if that part of the room
had no interest for him. Rosamond still
lingered near the window to try if she could
feel a breath of the outer atmosphere. There
was a momentary silence, which was broken
by her husband.

"What are you doing now?" he asked
anxiously.

"I am looking out at one of the broken
panes of glass, and trying to get some air,"
answered Rosamond. "The shadow of the
house is below me, resting on the lonely
garden; but there is no coolness breathing
up from it. I see the tall weeds rising
straight and still, and the tangled wild-flowers
interlacing themselves heavily. There is a
tree near me, and the leaves look as if they
were all struck motionless. Away to the
left, there is a peep of white sea and tawny
sand quivering in the yellow heat. There
are no clouds; there is no blue sky. The
mist quenches the brightness of the sunlight,
and lets nothing but the fire of it through.