"And what is that, madam? What will you have to do without?"
"I shall have to do without her."
"Ah, that would be a loss," he said, with hideous, offensive gallantry. "You are to be pitied, madam. You are, indeed, to be pitied, madam. Miss Grace will have to make up her mind on her side to do without----"
"Me; I know it," broke in the old woman, bursting into tears.
"Yes, madam; but that is not what I was going to say. I was about to say your granddaughter will have to do without me!" Here he leered at Edith. "I am much occupied with my mechanical studies in London, and am seldom at Eltham House. I hope you may be always able in your heart to do without me." He was standing leaning his misshapen, crooked body on his misshapen, crooked stick. He did not move his right hand from his waist, into which it was packed and driven by the weight of his body upon the handle of the stick. He put his long, lean, left, dark hand on his right breast, and bowed low by swinging himself to the right and downward on the crook of his stick. "Miss Grace will see, oh! so little of me," he added, as he rose and looked with his bold eyes at Edith and her grandmother.
"Oh!" cried the unhappy, tactless old woman, "I dare say she can manage that."
"I dare say she can," he said, gazing at Edith with eyes in which boldness and scorn seemed strangely, abominably blended, or rather conflicting.
At the time she felt she could cry for joy at the notion of seeing little of this hideous, deformed, monstrous dwarf.
The bargain was there and then completed, and it had been arranged that she should go to Eltham House that day week.
This night that was now upon her and around her, this dull, dark, heavy-perfumed, rain-drowned midsummer night, was the night of that day week. Only one week lay between the visit of this hunchback to their place in Grimsby Street, Westminster, and this day. This morning she had left London and seen Millway for the first time in her life. She had got there at noon and driven straight to Eltham House, two miles south of the little coast town. The hire of the cab had made considerable inroad on the money in her pocket. The sum was now reduced to only a few pence more than her mere train fare to London--not allowing even for a cab from Victoria Terminus to Grimsby Street, Westminster. When she got to Victoria she should have to walk home. Oh! walking home through the familiar streets thronged with everyday folk, would be so delightful compared with this bleak, solitary Eltham House, this hideous, insolent, monstrous, deformed dwarf.