"Oh, Oliver!" cried Céleste, "go and see what it is."
Oliver shook his head. "I cannot go," said he, huskily. "I am afraid. You do not know, Céleste, what an awful place this is! If you had seen what I have just beheld—"
"But you must go," said Céleste; "perhaps it is another in trouble like myself. I will wait for you here, Oliver; I am not afraid."
Oliver could not resist such an appeal; he turned, and began heavily ascending the stairs to the floor above. A door at a little distance stood ajar; it was thence that the monotonous sounds came. He advanced hesitatingly towards it, and reaching out his hand, pushed it, and it gaped slowly open upon the room beyond. Oliver only looked within for a moment, and then turned and walked stupidly away, but what he saw in that one glance was impressed upon his mind in an image never to be erased.
Tables and chairs were overturned; books lay torn and scattered upon the floor. In the middle of the room sat the woman whom he had first seen in the moonlit street at Flourens, and her pale, vacant eyes were fixed blankly upon him. Her white lips were slightly parted, but there was never a twitch upon the face that uttered those monotonous sobs that sounded dully through the silence.
Upon the floor lay stretched, bruised, battered, and bleeding, the withered, shrunken figure of an aged man, his limbs a mass of dried skin and bones. The yellow, parchment-like skin was stretched over his head and his face so tightly that it seemed as though it would crack. The shadow of death brooded upon him as he gazed with filmy, sightless eyes into the dark hollow of eternity that lay beyond. His breast, for a long time motionless, now and then heaved convulsively with the laboring breath. Such was the vision that Oliver saw in that one glance. Then he turned and walked away.
"Who was it, Oliver?" said Céleste.
Oliver answered never a word, but taking her by the hand, led her forcibly down the stairs and out of the house.