Verily, there was something regal in such hospitality as
this, accorded to a pauper lunatic.
Where was Steadman, the alert, the watchful, all this time? Mary
wondered. They had met no one. The house was as mute as if it were under
the spell of a magician. It was like that awful chamber in the Arabian
story, where the young man found the magic horse, and started on his
fatal journey. Mary felt as if here, too, there, must be peril; here,
too, fate was working.
The old man went to the writing table, pushed aside the papers, and then
stooped down and turned a mysterious handle or winch under the
knee-hole, and the writing-desk moved slowly on one side, while the
pigeon-holes sank, and a deep well full of secret drawers was laid open.
From one of these secret drawers the old man took a bunch of keys,
nodding, chuckling, muttering to himself as he groped for them with
tremulous hand.
'Steadman is uncommonly clever--thinks he knows everything--but he
doesn't know the trick of this table. I could hide a regiment of Sepoys
in this table, my dear.
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