He struck a match as he spoke, and lighted a lamp.  A moment more and he was gone.

Philip looked about him.  He was in a room fully twenty feet square, furnished in a manner that drew from him an audible gasp of astonishment.  At one end of the room was a massive mahogany bed, screened by heavy curtains which were looped back by silken cords.  Near the bed was an old-fashioned mahogany dresser, with a diamond-shaped mirror, and in front of it a straight-backed chair adorned with the grotesque carving of an ancient and long-dead fashion.  About him, everywhere, were the evidences of luxury and of age.  The big lamp, which gave a brilliant light, was of hammered brass; the base of its square pedestal was partly hidden in the rumples of a heavy damask spread which covered the table on which it rested.  The table itself was old, spindle-legged, glowing with the mellow luster endowed by many passing generations—­a relic of the days when the originator of its fashion became the favorite of a capricious and beautiful queen.  Soft rugs were upon the floor; from the walls, papered and hung with odd bits of tapestry, strange faces looked down upon Philip from out of heavy gilded frames; faces grim, pale, shadowed; men with plaited ruffles and curls; women with powdered hair, who gazed down upon him haughtily, as if they wondered at his intrusion.

One picture was turned with its face to the wall.

Philip sank into a huge arm-chair, cushioned with velvet, and dropped his cap upon the floor.  And this was Fort o’ God!  He scarcely breathed.  He was back two centuries, and he stared, as if each moment he expected some manifestation of life in what he saw.  He had dreamed his dream over the dead at Churchill; here it was reality—­almost; it lacked but a breath, a movement, a flutter of life in the dead faces that looked down upon him.  He gazed up at them again, and laughed a little nervously.  Then he fixed his eyes on the opposite wall.  One of the pictures was moving.  The thought in his brain had given birth to the movement he had imagined.  It was a woman’s face in the picture, young and beautiful, and it nodded to him, one moment radiant with light, the next caught in shadows that cast over it a gloom.  He jumped from his chair and went so that he stood directly under it.

A current of warm air shot up into his face from the floor.  It was this air that was causing movement in the picture, and he looked down.  What he discovered broke the spell he was under.  About him were the relics of age, of a life long dead.  Rubens might have sat in that room, and mourned over his handiwork, lost in a wilderness.  The stingy Louis might have recognized in the spindle-legged table a bit of his predecessor’s extravagance, which he had sold for the good of the exchequer of France; a Gobelin might have reclaimed one of the woven landscapes on the wall, a Grosellier himself have issued from behind the curtained bed.  Philip himself, in that environment, was the stranger.  It was the current of warm air which brought him back from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.  Under his feet was a furnace!