There was no glimmer of light from the lower windows, not even the noiseless flitting of a bat over the dark little court-yard.

His key let him in.

He knew that his servants were in bed.
There was something cynical in his ree-raw independence.

It was unlike what he had been used to, and its savagery suited with his bitter and unsociable mood of late.
But his step sounding through the hall, and the stories about the place of which he was conscious.

He battled with his disturbed foolish sensations, however, and though he knew there was a candle burning in his bed-room, he turned aside at the foot of the great stair, and stumbled and groped his way into the old wainscoted back-parlour, that looked out, through its great bow window, upon the haunted orchard, and sat down in its dismal solitude.
He ruminated upon his own hard fate--the meanness of man-kind--the burning wrongs, as he felt confident, of other times, Fortune's inexorable persecution of his family, and the stygian gulf that deepened between him and the object of his love; and his soul darkened with a fierce despair, and with unshaped but evil thoughts that invited the tempter.
The darkness and associations of the place were unwholesome, and he was about to leave it for the companionship of his candle, but that, on a sudden, he thought he heard a sound nearer than the breeze among the old orchard trees.
This was the measured breathing of some one in the room.