"Lenny, I have found another table," said Rosamond. "A miserable, forlorn-looking little thing, lost in a corner. I have just pushed it into the light, and I have discovered one drawer in it." She paused, and tried to open the drawer; but it resisted her. "Another lock!" she exclaimed, impatiently. "Even this wretched thing is closed against us!"
She pushed the table sharply away with her hand. It swayed on its frail legs, tottered, and fell over on the floor—fell as heavily as a table of twice its size—fell with a shock that rang through the room, and repeated itself again and again in the echoes of the lonesome north hall.
Rosamond ran to her husband, seeing him start from his seat in alarm, and told him what had happened. "You call it a little table," he replied, in astonishment. "It fell like one of the largest pieces of furniture in the room!"
"Surely there must have been something heavy in the drawer!" said Rosamond, approaching the table with her spirits still fluttered by the shock of its unnaturally heavy fall. After waiting for a few moments to give the dust which it had raised, and which still hung over it in thick lazy clouds, time to disperse, she stooped down and examined it. It was cracked across the top from end to end, and the lock had been broken away from its fastenings by the fall.
She set the table up again carefully, drew out the drawer, and, after a glance at its contents, turned to her husband. "I knew it," she said, "I knew there must be something heavy in the drawer. It is full of pieces of copper-ore, like those specimens of my father's, Lenny, from Porthgenna mine. Wait! I think I feel something else, as far away at the back here as my hand can reach."
She extricated from the lumps of ore at the back of the drawer a small circular picture-frame of black wood, about the size of an ordinary hand-glass. It came out with the front part downward, and with the area which its circle inclosed filled up by a thin piece of wood, of the sort which is used at the backs of small frames to keep drawings and engravings steady in them. This piece of wood (only secured to the back of the frame by one nail) had been forced out of its place, probably by the overthrow of the table; and when Rosamond took the frame out of the drawer, she observed between it and the dislodged piece of wood the end of a morsel of paper, apparently folded many times over, so as to occupy the smallest possible space. She drew out the piece of paper, laid it aside on the table without unfolding it, replaced the piece of wood in its proper position, and then turned the frame round, to see if there was a picture in front.
There was a picture—a picture painted in oils, darkened, but not much faded, by age. It represented the head of a woman, and the figure as far as the bosom.
The instant Rosamond's eyes fell on it she shuddered, and hurriedly advanced toward her husband with the picture in her hand.
"Well, what have you found now?" he inquired, hearing her approach.
"A picture," she answered, faintly, stopping to look at it again.