Roger was amazed at Annette's cleverness. He had not seen it himself, but she had. He exulted in the thought.
He lit it, and the poor little tall drawing-room came reluctantly into view, with its tarnished mirror from which the quicksilver had ebbed, and its flowered wall-paper over which the damp had scrawled its own irregular patterns. The furniture was of the kind that expresses only one idea and that a bad one. The foolish sofa, with a walnut backbone showing through a slit in its chintz cover, had a humped excrescence at one end like an uneasy chair, and the other four chairs had servilely imitated this hump, and sunk their individuality, if they ever had any, to be "a walnut suite." A glass-fronted chiffonier had done its horrid best to "be in keeping" with the suite. On the walls were a few prints of race-horses stretched out towards a winning-post; and steel engravings of the Emperor of the French in an order and the Empress Eugénie all smiles and ringlets served as pendants to two engravings of stags by Landseer.
Annette took off Roger's coat and laid it on a chair.
"Some one has been very unhappy here," she said, below her breath.
Roger did not hear her. He was drawing together the litter of waste-paper in the grate. And then—careful man!—having ascertained with the poker that the register was open, he set a light to it.
The dancing, garish firelight made the sense of desolation acute.
"Who lived here?" said Annette.
Roger hesitated a moment, and then said—
"A Mrs. Deane."
"Was she very old?"