She was now being carried up a flight of wooden steps. She counted twenty. The next flight, a shorter one, was of stone. Then came a few steps of level ground, and again Crispin proceeded to turn a key. When they had passed through this second door, and while Crispin was engaged in relocking it, Freda took the opportunity to drop her own handkerchief unseen by him. Then she was carried on again, along boarded floors and through two or three more doors, down a flight of stairs and to the dining-room. Here Crispin put her down and pushed her gently inside. Then he summoned Mrs. Bean, who looked at her with a puzzled and frightened face, and told her to bring something for the young lady to eat. Freda, who had sunk down in a chair by the fire to warm herself, sprang up at these words, and interrupted Crispin.
“Not for me,” she cried. “I will never eat anything again till I’m out of this house.”
“Then you’ll starve,” said Crispin quietly.
The girl flew up, shaking with fear, and horror, and anger. Mrs. Bean, who kept her eyes on the ground, but looked exceedingly troubled, remained in a half-furtive manner near the door.
“Do you think I care?” cried the girl, in a broken voice, “I know this house is a place to murder people in, and if I’m to be hidden away under the floor, like the poor man I found upstairs, I don’t care by what way you kill me first!”
The housekeeper’s face blanched at the girl’s words, but she did not utter a word, did not even look up. Crispin dismissed her with a nod, and turned to the young girl. Freda cowered on a chair, expecting a great outburst of anger from him. But there was a long silence, during which she heard him poke the fire and push the blazing logs together. At last he said, in an unemotional voice:
“I am not surprised that you want to know the meaning of the strange things you have seen and heard here.”
Freda answered passionately, only raising her head sufficiently to be heard,
“I do know the meaning of it all. It is you who have murdered both my father and Blewitt!”
“The d——l it is!” exclaimed Crispin, in unmistakable amusement and surprise. “If you give information against me on that ground, you will create a small sensation in Presterby.”