Page:Rajmohan's Wife.djvu/151

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MADHAV AND TARA
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the fourth key he tried turned in the lock, and away flew the heavy door as though it were a feather.

"Tara! Tara! hesitate not, but follow," he said, with compressed energy, and crept in, bruising his sides.

Led by the contagion of impulse, Tara followed with the light. Joy and surprise held Madhav mute when they discerned a staircase of brick, narrow and deep, and filled with spiders' webs. Without stopping to speak Madhav bounded up, and Tara lost in amazement, mechanically continued to follow. The staircase led to a small door of apparently an upper-storied room. A glance at the very small height of this room sufficed to convince Madhav of the art with which it had been so made as to be concealed from every other part of the building. He saw that the height of the two rooms, upper and lower together, made up the height of the side-rooms and the veranda, and being destitute of windows the existence of the upper story could not possibly be discerned from any other part of the building, nor any way suspected except by a comparison of the height of the central room with that of the adjacent ones.

Madhav, anxious and trembling, sought the lock of this second door and, after two or three fruitless attempts in which the violent movement of the keys brought blood from his fingers, he succeeded, and threw open the plated door ringing and echoing. Tara entered with him, holding the light in her hand. The feeble glimmer it

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