“It is only a rat; the house is full of them,” he explained, as he sat down beside her.
“Oh-h! I have a mortal terror of rats and mice, too. Let’s go,” Helen cried as she drew her feet up from the door.
“No, not yet,” Mark said. “There’s a chair somewhere in which you can put your feet and be safe from the marauders.”
He found the chair and brought it to her; then resuming his seat he continued: “I am afraid you are not pleased with my ancestral halls.”
Now that she was in no danger from the rats, Helen was less nervous and began to look around her with some curiosity.
“It is a creepy kind of place and the last I should choose for a rendezvous,” she said. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Because there is something I must say to you which I can say better here than where we would be liable to interruptions,” Mark replied, putting his arm on the back of the settee where it would be very convenient for it to drop across her shoulders. “I told you the story of this house in the cemetery, by ’Tina’s grave, and only the fact that I had known you so short a time prevented me from telling you another story which I have brought you here to listen to. You have heard it many times, for I know your reputation, and I believe that when you came to Ridgefield Craig Mason was your object.”
Helen did not speak, and Mark continued: “I have watched events closely. Craig is interested in you. How could it be otherwise, but I do not believe he will ever have the courage to declare himself. He is not a ladies’ man,—is not your style. He is a student, self-absorbed and quiet, caring nothing for the things which make your world. He is the soul of honor, and a splendid fellow, with no fault or bad habit, such as most men have. He neither smokes, nor drinks, nor swears, and is as pure in thought and speech as a woman,—purer than many.”
“Then why are you running him down?” Helen asked, and Mark replied, “I am not running him down, and I hardly know why I am speaking of him at all, except that it seems as if he were near us, or that I was taking an unfair advantage of his absence.”
Helen’s hand was in her pocket clutching Craig’s letter, with a view to bring it out and declare what he was to her. But she didn’t. Years after, when so much was said of hypnotism, she recalled that night and said she was hypnotized, but she did not think so then. She only knew that the man beside her talking of the man to whom she was engaged had a power over her which she did not try to analyze, nor resist. His arm had dropped from the settee and was lying across her shoulders and she did not shake it off, as he went on: