"As you observe," he cried, when she had done, "it would seem that the finger of God has moved already. She knew you although you did not know her, and the sight of you was as though one had risen from the grave; it filled her with unescapable terror."
"It's difficult to explain--I've not been able to explain it to myself until this minute--but I did know her, that is, I felt as if I ought to know her. Directly Harry pointed her out to me, something struck at my heart and set me trembling. I don't often tremble, but I did then. It was as if I were confronted by some dreadful danger, which had threatened me before, and from which I had then only escaped by the skin of my teeth. And yet I don't know that the feeling which affected me most strongly was terror. No, I don't think it was. It was something else--something which I can't describe. I believe--doctor, I believe it was hatred. I hated that woman with a hatred which was altogether beyond anything of which I had dreamed as possible, of which I had supposed myself to be capable. I don't hate people as a rule; I don't remember ever having met any one whom I seriously disliked. I do think that in almost every one I have come across I have seen something which I liked. But--in her! I didn't want Harry to introduce me, to take me nearer, because I was filled with what seemed even to me an insane, indeed a demoniacal desire to kill her where she stood."
While the girl was speaking her appearance seemed to gradually change, till, when she stopped, she seemed to stand before the old man like some rhadamanthine, accusatory spirit, ready to pronounce judgment and to execute the judgment which she herself pronounced. The doctor watched her with a visage which remained immobile, almost expressionless.
"Your words suggest a kind of justice which has become extinct--in politer circles."
"Yet justice shall be done!--it shall be done! I will see to it. I never did her a harm, nor wished her one. Yet she has done me all the mischief that she could, for wickedness' sake. If she killed Cuthbert Grahame, she should have killed me also, for, if I live, I will bring her to the judgment-seat. You say she is in enjoyment of the money which she won from him by a trick, and whose safe possession she insured to herself by murder----"
"Pardon me; to her that's the fly in the ointment. It's precisely the money which she hasn't got--which is doubly hard, since, to gain it, she did all that she did."
"I thought you said that she had it."
"She has the will under which she inherits, but, so far, she has inherited comparatively little. Did Grahame ever talk to you about his money?"
"In those latter days, when I began to be a woman, there were only two things about which he would talk, one was his money, the other his desire that I should be his wife. I loved him dearly! No daughter ever loved her father better than I loved him, but not like that!--not like that! When I said no, he would talk of his money, holding it out as a bait."
"Did he ever tell you how much of it there was?"