Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/89

Rh divide themselves into different periods during the twenty years that Benjamin Corvet had lived alone here.

Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer to him; they gave him a little of the feeling he had been unable to get when he looked at his father's picture. He could realize better now the lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill, taking up for distraction one subject of study after another, exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it engross him, and then absorbing himself in the next.

These two rooms evidently had been the ones most used by his father; the other rooms on this floor, as Alan went into them one by one, he found spoke far less intimately of Benjamin Corvet. A dining-room was in the front of the house to the north side of the hall; a service room opened from it, and on the other side of the service room was what appeared to be a smaller dining-room. The service room communicated both by dumb waiter and stairway with rooms below; Alan went down the stairway only far enough to see that the rooms below were servants' quarters; then he came back, turned out the light on the first floor, struck another match, and went up the stairs to the second story.

The rooms opening on to the upper hall, it was plain to him, though their doors were closed, were mostly bedrooms. He put his hand at hazard on the nearest door and opened it. As he caught the taste and smell of the air in the room—heavy, colder, and deader even than the air in the rest of the house—he hesitated; then with his match he found the light switch.

The room and the next one which communicated with it evidently were—or had been—a woman's bedroom