I went slowly up the passage, and before I had reached the foot of the stairs he overtook me, and we went up together. He had his crimson silk handkerchief in his hand, and I remember wondering why he kept pressing it to his mouth as we walked along the corridor side by side.
A faint light shone through the open door of the room over the hall door, the one that opened into mine, and against the grey light I saw in the window a crouching figure indistinctly silhouetted.
My uncle saw it too. With a muttered exclamation of anger, he walked quickly past me to the open doorway.
“What are you doing here?” he said sternly. “You know I desired you not to come upstairs, and this is the second time this week I have found you here.”
He stepped back to one side, and a tall woman with a shawl covering her bent shoulders shuffled out of the room. I had already guessed that it was Moll Hourihane, and I shrank back into the doorway of my own room; but she stopped, and, stretching out her neck towards me, she fixed her eyes upon my face with an expression of hungry eagerness.
“Did you hear what I ordered you? Go down at once,” repeated my uncle, placing himself between her and me. “Let me never find you here again.”
She immediately turned and slunk away round the far side of the corridor, and, looking back once more at me, disappeared through the door that led to the servants’ quarters.
I gave a sigh of relief. “That woman terrifies me,” I said. “I wish she would not look at me in that dreadful way.”
“You need not be alarmed”—he spoke breathlessly and with unusual excitement—“she is perfectly harmless; but I do not choose to have her roaming about the house. These are the pictures of which we were speaking,” he continued. “The one to the right was done of me, and this—this is the other”—pointing to an old-fashioned looking portrait of a pretty dark-haired boy holding a spaniel in his arms.