CHAPTER VI.
“I AM NO BEGGAR.”
Squire Moulton was walking on the white pebbly margin of his beautiful miniature lake.
His head was bowed upon his narrow and sunken chest, his hands were clasped with rigid firmness at his back, while his long grizzly hair hung in neglected masses around his stooping shoulders.
His face, always ugly, looked yellower and uglier still as the dim light of a cloudy day—rendered yet more dismal by the thick branches of the overhanging trees—fell around him.
He looked like some restless evil spirit haunting that lovely spot, and lying in wait for his unsuspecting prey, rather than the master and the owner of so much beauty.
He was pacing back and forth in deep and evidently unpleasant meditation, judging of his lowering brow and the mutterings constantly issuing from his thin lips.
He doubtless considered himself entirely alone. But he could not see the pair of eyes, bright and black, and evil as his own, that glared fiercely upon him from within a closely growing circle of arbor vitæ.
For an hour his restless pacings and mutterings had continued, and for an hour these fierce eyes had blazed upon him, at first with anger and hatred, then as time went on, with uneasiness. Evidently whoever was within that verdant circle was becoming impatient with the proprietor’s lengthened promenade; for there was a slight rustle as if some one was trying to change his or her position.
Unlucky moment!
For losing its balance, a figure came crushing against the branches with a force that could not fail to disturb and attract the attention of the master of Moulton Hall.