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Updated: June 5, 2025
As Melrose unlocked the gate, the house door opened, and three huge dogs came bounding out, in front of a gray-haired man, whom the driver of the wagonette knew to be "owd Dixon," Melrose's butler and factotum. The driver was watching the whole scene with an absorbed curiosity, when Melrose turned, threw him a sudden look, paid him, and peremptorily bade him be off.
She could not forget the handsome head as she had seen it last at the door of Melrose's library; or the melodramatic black and white of the face, of the small, peaked beard, the dark brows, pale lantern cheeks, and heavy-lidded eyes. All the picturesque adventurers of the world betray something, she thought, of a common stamp.
"There isn't a room upstairs but what's full o' Muster Melrose's things. Yo' mun do wi' this, or naethin'." Undershaw submitted, and Faversham's bearers gently laid him down, spreading their coats on the bare floor to receive him, till a bed could be found.
Once or twice she tried to turn the talk to his altered future, and the obligations and interests that lay before him; but he shrugged away from the subject, questioning her instead about the motley company at Violet Melrose's, and fitting a droll or malicious anecdote to each of the people she named.
She never harangued about them; a few words, a few looks, burning from an inward fire these expressed her: as when, twice, he had met her at dusk, with the aspect of a wounded spirit, coming out of hovels that he himself must now be ashamed of, since they were Melrose's hovels. "I've just come from Mainstairs," he said to her abruptly, as the house in front drew nearer.
Aloud he said: "A couple of thousand pounds, according to Undershaw, would do the job. If you succeed in forcing them out, where are they to go?" "That's not our affair." Tatham caught up his hat and stick, and abruptly departed; reflecting indeed when he reached the street, that he had not been the most diplomatic of ambassadors on Mrs. Melrose's behalf.
He was perfectly kind and polite to them but Netta's cowardice disgusted him; and it was a personal disappointment to be thus balked of that public campaign against Melrose's enormities which would have satisfied the just and long-baffled feelings of a whole county; and incidentally would surely have unmasked a greedy and unscrupulous adventurer. Meanwhile the whole story of Mrs.
And he walked away, his inner mind shaken with a passion that forbade him to stay and talk with Melrose's agent. Two or three labourers who were lounging in front of their houses came slowly toward the agent.
Melrose's face was ashen, and she looked as if touched by the heat. "No no, dear!" she said, with a sort of terrified brevity. "You and Chris were wrong there. I can't talk to you about it, Alice," she broke off, pleadingly; "you mustn't ask me, dear. You said you wouldn't," she pleaded, trembling. Alice was stupefied. For a full minute she lay in her pillows, staring blankly at her mother.
But the more he dwelt for consolation on the prospect of Melrose's disappearance, the more attractive became to him the vision of his own coming reign. Some day he would be his own master, and the master of these hoards.
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