She did not speak, but turned her head in the direction of the door of communication which he had left ajar.
“If you wish it, by all means,” he said, answering that look, and he rose and not only shut but locked it.
“Now, what have you to tell me,” he asked.
She put back her veil and looked him straight in the face.
As she did so, he shrank as though he had received a blow, and every particle of colour left him.
“Miss Moffat!” he exclaimed. “You in Ireland?”
“Yes; at Maryville,” was her reply. “Now, you know why I am here.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, and unlocking the door passed out into his surgery. He was not a man addicted to stimulants. Even in these days he would have been accounted abstemious, and for those times when temperance had scarcely established itself as a virtue, he was reckoned, amongst wild young fellows who knew no better, and old ones who ought to have known better, a milksop who was “afraid to take his liquor because he could not carry it.”
Now, however, he unlocked a cupboard, and pouring himself out half a tumbler of raw spirit, swallowed it at a gulp; then he went back and said,—
“No, Miss Moffat, I do not know why you are here; though I can guess why you might have sent some one else.”