"I have come to bid you all good-by," he answers, in a low, quick voice, with his eyes bent on the ground; "you know"—raising them, and beginning to laugh hoarsely—"if—if—things had gone right—you would have been my nearest relation by now."
I shudder.
"Yes," say I, "I know."
"I am going away," he goes on, raising his voice to a louder tone of reckless unrest, "where?—God knows!—I do not, and do not care either!—going away for good!—I am going to let the abbey."
"To let it!"
"You are glad!" he cries in a tone of passionate and sombre resentment, while his great eyes, lifted, flash a miserable resentment into mine; "I knew you would be! I have not given you much pleasure very often, have I?"—(still with that same harsh mirth).—"Well, it is something to have done it once!"
I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together. I lift my eyes to the low, dark sky.
"Am I glad?" I say, hazily. "I do not know!—I do not think I am!—I do not think I care one way or another!"
"Nancy!" he says, presently, in a tone no longer of counterfeit mirth, but of deep and serious earnestness, "I do not know why I told you just now that I had come to bid them all good-by—it was not true—you know it was not. What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came—"
"For what did you come, then?" cry I, interrupting him, pantingly, while my eyes, wide and aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is going to say? He—from whose clasp Barbara's dead hand was freed!