Roanoke of Roanoke Hall: A Romance — page 194: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

188 Roanoke of Roanoke Hall. It was richly bound in unusually solid leather covers, stoutly sewn, and gilded and tooled with exceptional grace and delicacy— & priceless treasure to one of those dilettanti who collect such trifles ; but I imagined that it was in the interior that I must seek for the secret that I felt sure awaited me. I opened it, and on the instant the shadow fell across it.. I closed it, and the figure moved aside. Every subsequent attempt tended to prove the same strange fact,—that it was the out- side, not the inside, of the volume that con- cerned me. I examined every detail of the ornamenta- tion with scrupulous care, but conld find nothing whatever to warrant this supposition, and I had well-nigh concluded that there was in it no aid to the unveiling of the secret, or that it was so ingeniously concealed that it was impenetrable, when an accidental discov- ery that I made convinced me that there was more in the matter than had as yet met my eyes. In pacing the room, while turning the affair over in my mind, I happened to pause in a direct line ‘between the portrait and the spot where the mystic volume had so long ( 1OOY | © comichbooks.com