Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/182

 and was obliged to entreat her to use her own fancy in the perusal of Matilda's woes. Catherine, recollecting herself, grew ashamed of her eagerness, and began earnestly to assure him that her attention had been fixed without the smallest apprehension of really meeting with what he related. 'Miss Tilney,' she was sure, 'would never put her into such a chamber as he had described. She was not at all afraid.'"

In spite of her disclaimer, Catherine's nerves had been sufficiently excited by a prolonged course of such reading as Henry Tilney had so well parodied as to be quite capable of any foolish imaginations.

Of course the first sight of Northanger Abbey is disappointing to her, as it is modernized out of all picturesqueness or romance, and even her own room she finds very unlike the one by the description of which Henry had endeavoured to alarm her. Nevertheless, she has not been long in it, and is still occupied in dressing for the five o'clock dinner, when "her eye suddenly fell on a large high chest, standing back in a deep recess on one side of the fire-place. The sight of it made her start; and, forgetting everything else, she stood gazing on it in motionless wonder while these thoughts crossed her: 'This is strange, indeed! I did not expect such a sight as this. An immense heavy chest! What can it hold? Why should it be placed here? Pushed back, too, as if meant to be out of sight! I will look into it; cost me what it may, I will look into it; and directly, too—by daylight. If I stay till evening, my candle may go out.' She advanced, and examined it closely; it was of cedar, curiously inlaid with some darker wood, and raised about a foot from the ground on a carved stand of the same. The lock was silver, though