"If you call me brother again, you shall be lost, Mr. Lupin. I tell you once for all, I don't know anything of my wife's going out or coming home, and I don't want to see you in my shop any more. If it were not for one person in this world, and that one an angel, if ever one lived upon the earth, I should not care how soon my head was laid low."
"Humph! brother Oakley! Humph!"
Oakley caught up a file to throw at the head of the hypocrite, but there was such an expression of triumph upon his face, that the heart of the old spectacle-maker sunk within him as he thought to himself, "This man brings ill news, or he would never look as he does." The file dropped from his hands, and pushing his spectacles up to the top of his head, he glared at Lupin as he said—
"Speak—speak! What have you to say?"
"Humph!"
"Speak man, if you be a man!"
"Humph, brother Oakley; you have a daughter—Johanna?"
"Yes, yes!" cried old Oakley. "My heart told me that it was of my child this wretch came to speak. Tell me all instantly. Speak—what of my dear Johanna? I will wrest the truth from you. Has anything happened—is she well? Speak—speak!"
Mr. Oakley sprang upon the preacher, and seizing him by the throat, forced him back until he fell upon an old chest in the shop that was full of tools and the lid of which giving way with Lupin's weight and the sudden concussion with which he came upon it, precipitated him into the box among a number of pointed implements, the effect of which may be better imagined than described, as the newspapers say.
"Murder! murder!" screamed the preacher.