For the first time, something like a smile showed itself faintly on his
lips--and represented the only effect which my severity had produced. He
still followed his own train of thought, as resolutely and as
impertinently as ever.

"I haven't seen you talking to Cristel before to-night. Have you been
meeting her in secret?"

In justice to the girl, I felt that I ought to set him right, so far.
Taking up the pencil again, I told this strange man that I had just
returned to England, after an absence of many years in foreign
countries--that I had known Cristel when we were both children--and that
I had met her purely by accident, when he had detected us talking outside
the cottage. Seeing me pause, after advancing to that point in the
writing of my reply, he held out his hand impatiently for the paper. I
signed him to wait, and added a last sentence: "Understand this; I will
answer no more questions--I have done with the subject."

He read what I had written with the closest attention. But his inveterate
suspicion of me was not set at rest, even yet.

"Are you likely to come this way again?" he asked.

I pointed to the final lines of my writing, and got up to go.

This assertion of my will against his roused him. He stopped me at the
door--not by a motion of his hand but by the mastery of his look. The dim
candlelight afforded me no help in determining the color of his eyes.
Dark, large, and finely set in his head, there was a sinister passion in
them, at that moment, which held me in spite of myself. Still as