must speak with you." Her heart palpitated, her breast heaved. She could only utter short sentences.
"Sit down there!" he beckoned with the stalk of his pipe.
She still refused to obey. Her power was slipping from her. The exhaustion after the excitement she had gone through had affected even her stout will. She resolved to oppose him in this trifling matter, but knew that her resolution was infirm. She clung desperately to what remained to her of power.
"I will not listen to a word you say unless you sit down."
He paused, and looked at her; then he said, "Go to your mother!" and continued his smoking, with face averted.
"Elijah, I know what you have done, and are doings now for my mother."
He sprang from his seat, and strode up and down the room, turning and glowering at her, sucking at his pipe, and making it red and angry like his eyes in the firelight. He walked fast and noisily on the brick floor, with his high shoulders up and his head down. She watched him with painful apprehension; he reminded her of the mad brother pacing in the vault below. She could not speak to him whilst he persisted in this irritating, restless tramp. There was no help for it. She dropped into her mother's leather chair.
"There!" said he, and he flung a ring with some keys attached to it, into her lap, "Take them. They are yours now. The keys of everything in the house, except of—" he jerked his pipe towards the den beneath.
"I cannot take them," she said, and let them slide off her lap upon the floor.
" Pick them up!" he ordered.
"No," she said firmly, "I will not. Elijah, we must come to an understanding with each other."
"We already understand each other," he said, pausing in his walk. "We always did. I can read your heart. I know everything that passes there, just as if it was written in red letters on a page. I understand you, and there's nobody else in the world that can. I was made to read you, I heard a Baptist preacher say one day that
