"But you must not do it, grandfather; it isn't right. The place was never meant to belong to me."
"Well, it belongs to me, I reckon, and confound your silly puritanical fancies, I'll leave it where I please," retorted Fletcher, and strode from the room.
Throwing herself back into her chair, Maria lay for a time looking thoughtfully at the hickory log, which crumbled and threw out a shower of red sparks. Her face was grave, but there was no hint of indecision upon it, and it struck Carraway very forcibly at the instant that she knew her own mind quite clearly and distinctly upon this as upon most other matters.
"It may surprise you," she said presently, speaking with sudden passion, "but by right the Hall ought not to be mine, and I do not want it. I have never loved it because it has never for a moment seemed home to me, and our people have always appeared strangers upon the land. How we came here I do not know, but it has not suited us, and we have only disfigured a beauty into which we did not fit. Its very age is a reproach to us, for it shows off our newness—our lack of any past that we may call our own. Will might feel himself master here, but I cannot."
Carraway took off his glasses and rubbed patiently at the ridge they had drawn across his nose.
"And yet, why not?" he asked. "The place has been in your grandfather's possession now for more than twenty years."
"For more than twenty years," repeated Maria scornfully, "and before that the Blakes lived here—how long?"
He met her question squarely. "For more than two hundred."
Without shifting her steady gaze which she turned upon his face, she leaned forward, clasping her hands loosely upon the knees.
"There are things that I want to know, Mr. Carraway," she said, "many things, and I believe that you can tell me. Most of all, I want to know why we ever came to Blake Hall? Why the Blakes ever left it? And, above all, why they have hated us so heartily and so long?"