“I see heaps of money and a great many friends in the change that is coming to you. Dear me! how many suitors! But I cannot promise you any marriage as brilliant as my friend has just offered your sister. You may be certain, however, that you'll have your own choice in this, as you have in all things.”
“Thank you for nothing,” said Clementina's voice. “But what are those horrid black cards beside them?—that's trouble, I'm sure.”
“Not for you, though near you. Perhaps some one you don't care much for and don't understand will have a heap of trouble on your account,—yes, on account of these very riches; see, he follows the ten of diamonds. It may be a suitor; it may be some one now in the house, perhaps.”
“He means himself, Miss Clementina,” struck in Grant's voice laughingly.
“You're not listening, Miss Harkutt,” said Rice with half-serious reproach. “Perhaps you know who it is?”
But Miss Clementina's reply was simply a hurried recognition of her father's pale face that here suddenly confronted her with the opening door.
“Why, it's father!”
CHAPER III.
In his strange mental condition even the change from Harkutt's feeble candle to the outer darkness for a moment blinded Elijah Curtis, yet it was part of that mental condition that he kept moving steadily forward as in a trance or dream, though at first purposelessly. Then it occurred to him that he was really looking for his horse, and that the animal was not there. This for a moment confused and frightened him, first with the supposition that he had not brought him at all, but that it was part of his delusion; secondly, with the conviction that without his horse he could neither proceed on the course suggested by Harkutt, nor take another more vague one that was dimly in his mind. Yet in his hopeless vacillation it seemed a relief that now neither was practicable, and that he need do nothing. Perhaps it was a mysterious providence!