When she reached the foot of the stairs that leads to the gallery on which the room occupied by Alice opens, instead of pursuing her way to the kitchen she turned into a narrow and dark passage that is hemmed in on the side opposite to the wall by the ascending staircase.

The shadows of the banisters on the panelled oak flew after one another in sudden chase as the old woman glided by, and looking up and back she stopped at the door of a small room, constructed as we see in similar old houses, under the stairs. On the panel of this she struck a muffled summons with her fist, and on the third or fourth the startled voice of Tom demanded roughly from within,—

“What’s that?”

“Hish!” said the old woman, through a bit of the open door.

“’Tis Mrs. Tarnley—only me.”

“Lauk, woman, ye did take a rise out o’ me. I thought ye was—I don’t know what—I was a dreaming, I think.”

“Never mind, you must be awake for an hour or so,” said Mrs. Tarnley, entering the den without more ceremony.

Tom didn’t mind Mrs. Tarnley, nor Mrs. Tarnley Tom, a rush. She set the candle on the tiled floor. Tom was sitting in his shirt on the side of his “settlebed,” with his hands on his knees.

“Ye must get on your things, Tom, and if ever you stirred yourself, be alive now. The master’s a comin’, and may be here, across Cressley Common in half an hour, or might be in five minutes, and ye must go out a bit and meet him, and—are ye awake?”

“Starin’. Go on,”

“Ye’ll tell him just this, the big woman as lives at Hoxton——”

“Hoxton! Well?”.

“That Master Harry has all the trouble wi’, has come here, angry, in search of Master Harry, mind, and is in the bedroom over the hall-door. Will ye mind all that now?”

“Ay,” said Tom, and repeated it.

“Well, he’ll know better whether it’s best for him to come on or turn back. But if come on he will, let him come in at the kitchen door, mind, and you go that way, too, and he’ll find neither bolt nor bar, but open doors, and nothing but the latch between him and the kitchen, and me sitting by the fire; but don’t you clap a door, nor tread heavy, but remember there’s a sharp pair of ears that ’id hear a cricket through the three walls o’ Carwell Grange.”

She took up the candle, and herself listened for a moment at the door, and again turned her earnest and sinister lace on Tom.

“And again, I say, Tom, if ever ye was quick, be quick now,” and she clapped her lean hand down on his shoulder with a sort of fierce shake; “and if ever ye trod soft, go softly now, mind.”

Tom, who was scratching his head, and staring in her face, nodded.

“And mind you, the kitchen way, and afraid o’ slips, say ye the message over again to me”

This he did, glibly enough.

“Here, light your candle from this, and if ye fail your master now, never, call yourself man again.”

Having thus charged him, she went softly from this nook with its slanting roof, and thinking of the thankless world, and all the trouble her old bones and brain were put to, she lost her temper, at the foot of the great staircase, and was near turning back again to the kitchen, or perhaps whisking out of the door herself, and marching off to Cressley Common to meet her master, and shock and scare him all she could, and place her resignation, as more distinguished functionaries sometimes do theirs, in the hands of her employer, to prove his helplessness and her own importance, and so assert herself for time past and to come.

Her interview with Tom had not occupied much time. She knocked at the Vrau’s door, and entering, found that person at the close of a greedy repast.

Emotions of fear, I suppose, disturb the appetite, much more than others. Not caring one farthing about Charles, she did not grieve at his infidelity; taking profligacy for granted as the rule of life, it did not even shock her. But she was stung with a furious pang of jealousy, for that needs no love, being in its essence the sense of property invaded, supremacy insulted, and: self despised. In this sort of jealousy there is neither the sublimity of despair nor the pathos of sorrow, but simply the malice, fury, and revenge of outraged egotism.

There she sat, unconscious of the glimmer of the firelight, feeding as a beast will bleeding after a blow. Beast she was, with the bestial faculty of cherishing a long revenge, with bestial treachery and seeming unconcern.

“Ho oh! you’ve come back,” she cried, with playful reproach, “cruel old girl! you leave your poor vrau alone, alone among the ghosts—now, sit down, are you sitting? and tell me everything, and all the news—did you bring a little brandy or what?”

Her open hand was extended, and gently moving over the tray at about the level of the top of a bottle.

“No, ma’am, I haven’t none in my charge, but there’s a smell o’ brandy about,” said Mildred, who liked saying a disagreeable thing.

“So there ought,” said the gaunt woman placidly, and lifted a big black bottle that lay in her lap, like a baby, folded in a grey shawl. “But I’ll want this, don’t you see, when I’m............