The window facing the door was wide open.

The shutters were broken; one of them was hanging crookedly from only its bottom hinge.
The top of a ladder rose above the window-sill, and beside it, astraddle the sill, was an Empire card-table, half inside the room, half out.

On the hearth-rug, before a large tapestry fire-screen, which masked the wide fireplace, built in imitation of the big, wide fireplaces of our ancestors, and rose to the level of the chimney-piece-a magnificent chimney-piece in carved oak-were some chairs tied together ready to be removed.
The Duke and the inspector ran to the window, and looked down into the garden.

It was empty.

At the further end of it, on the other side of its wall, rose the scaffolding of a house a-building.