Thomas Milsom found the girl standing at the top of the stairs, as if waiting for some one.
"What are you standing mooning there for?" asked the man. "Why don't you go to bed?"
"Why have you brought that sailor here?" inquired the girl, without noticing Milsom's question.
"What's that to you? You'd like to know my business, wouldn't you? I've brought him here because he wanted to come. Is that a good answer? I've brought him here because he has money to lose, and is in the humour to lose it. Is that a better answer?"
"Yes," returned the girl, fixing her eyes upon him with a look of horror; "you will win his money, and, if he is angry, there will be a quarrel, as there was on that hideous night three years ago, when you brought home the foreign sailor, and what happened to that man will happen to this one. Father," cried the girl, suddenly and passionately, "let this man leave the house in safety. I sometimes think my heart is almost as hard as yours; but this man trusts us. Don't let any harm come to him."
"Why, what harm should come to him?"
For some time the girl called Jenny stood before her father in silence, with her head bent, and her face in shadow; then she lifted her head suddenly, and looked at him piteously.
"The other!" she murmured; "the other! I remember what happened to him."
"Come, drop that!" cried Milsom, savagely; "do you think I'm going to stand your mad talk? Get to bed, and go to sleep. And the sounder you sleep the better, unless you want to sleep uncommonly sound for the future, my lady."
The ruffian seized his daughter by the arm, and half pushed, half flung her into a room, the door of which stood open. It was the dreary room which she called her own. Milsom shut the door upon her, and locked it with a key which he took from his pocket—a key which locked every door in the house. "And now, I flatter myself, you're safe, my pretty singing-bird," he muttered.