Rosamond approached more closely to the doors, and answered in the affirmative.
"Open them, then," said Leonard. "Stop! not by yourself. Take me with you. I don't like the idea of sitting here, and leaving you to open those doors by yourself."
Rosamond retraced her steps to the place where he was sitting, and then led him with her to the door that was farthest from the window. "Suppose there should be some dreadful sight behind it!" she said, trembling a little, as she stretched out her hand toward the key.
"Try to suppose (what is much more probable) that it only leads into another room," suggested Leonard.
Rosamond threw the door wide open, suddenly. Her husband was right. It merely led into the next room.
They passed on to the second door. "Can this one serve the same purpose as the other?" said Rosamond, slowly and distrustfully turning the key.
She opened it as she had opened the first door, put her head inside it for an instant, drew back, shuddering, and closed it again violently, with a faint exclamation of disgust.
"Don't be alarmed, Lenny," she said, leading him away abruptly. "The door only opens on a large, empty cupboard. But there are quantities of horrible, crawling brown creatures about the wall inside. I have shut them in again in their darkness and their secrecy; and now I am going to take you back to your seat, before we find out, next, what the book-case contains."
The door of the upper part of the book-case, hanging open and half dropping from its hinges, showed the emptiness of the shelves on one side at a glance. The corresponding door, when Rosamond pulled it open, disclosed exactly the same spectacle of barrenness on the other side. Over every shelf there spread the same dreary accumulation of dust and dirt, without a vestige of a book, without even a stray scrap of paper lying any where in a corner to attract the eye, from top to bottom.
The lower portion of the book-case was divided into three cupboards. In the door of one of the three, the rusty key remained in the lock. Rosamond turned it with some difficulty, and looked into the cupboard. At the back of it were scattered a pack of playing-cards, brown with dirt. A morsel of torn, tangled muslin lay among them, which, when Rosamond spread it out, proved to be the remains of a clergyman's band. In one corner she found a broken corkscrew and the winch of a fishing-rod; in another, some stumps of tobacco-pipes, a few old medicine bottles, and a dog's-eared peddler's song-book. These were all the objects that the cupboard contained. After Rosamond had scrupulously described each one of them to her husband, just as she found it, she went on to the second cupboard. On trying the door, it turned out not to be locked. On looking inside, she discovered nothing but some pieces of blackened cotton wool, and the remains of a jeweler's packing-case.