“It will suit me very well, I dare say,” said Gray; “when I have finished my meal, I will look at it.”
He was not long in consuming the meat and bread, and after a glass or two of the wine he felt wonderfully refreshed, and his old quiet smile of cunning and ferocity began to linger on his face as he muttered,—
“Well, if the squire consents to my terms, and advances me a large sum of money at once, I will leave directly; and if he will not, I must increase my demands upon him as far as I can, without awakening his suspicions, and then leave him and Britton to destruction; it will go hard but I will find a means of revenge against her, who has caused me such unexampled misery and distress. Ada, beware! Yet you are not safe from Jacob Gray. He is a miner, who works in silence and secret, until some day you find what you verily considered the solid foundation on which you were treading immutable, you will find it crumbling beneath your feet. I have a plan—yes, I have a plan to wrest from you, Ada, all that would have been yours had you waited my time.”
Full of these thoughts, Jacob Gray summoned the woman, and desired to be shown the chamber she had mentioned. It was a remarkable low-roofed attic, but it suited Gray well, for no one, he thought, would suspect him of living in, to him, so dangerous a neighbourhood as the Strand, where every inhabitant was full of gossip about the murder of Vaughan.
“This will do,” he said. “What is the price?”
Two shillings a week were named, to which Gray assented, and paying some few weeks in advance, he said,—
“When ever I go out I take the key of this room with me, and whatever requires to be done to it, must be done when I am at home, I make my own bed.”
“Very well, just as you like.”
“And mark my words, if any one should come here and ask you if you have a lodger of any description, unless you unhesitatingly answer no, I leave directly.”
“Lor, sir,—suppose some friend of your honour’s was to call.”