Standing in the corridor she pressed her thin hands against her face. As though she could feel through the door the repulsion of his violence, she shrank against the wall. His fierce tongue probed her softness; his strength had outraged her submission; his independence, exaggerated almost to insanity, bruised and bewildered her well-tutored mind. "He's mad. He's mad," she thought. "Better not go at all than break down in the middle."
From inside the parlour the cuckoo-clock piped suddenly five hollow notes. "Five o'clock. If I mean to post that letter I must go in now—now."
She went forward and tapped at the door.
She had been in before several times with Mrs. Todd, but always had retreated as soon as courtesy made possible. Never before had she been in alone.
The room now seemed to float in liquid firelight. Upborne upon the flickering flood she could see here a jar of delicate gilt and ivory beneath a fiery glass bubble; there the corner of a polished picture-frame; a wool worked footstool, the basket of sewing that Mrs. Meggie had left on the table. Slowly the quivering movement steadied before her eyes, and from the dancing shadows the solid bulk of old Mrs. Todd's chair rose like an island, and there by the window she saw William Todd.
He lay as usual gazing out across the moor, his hawk-like profile outlined against the melting silver of the wintry sun that flowed between dark banks of hill and sky. All the Todds had sharp features and noses hooked almost to a deformity, but sickness had emaciated a naturally lean face, until William Todd was terrible enough to see.
Muriel closed the door very quietly, and went across to the couch in the window. Even when she stood beside him, he did not seem to see her, but lay as still as the furniture or the dark moor. The room was silent. Only the light flames rustled like the restless wings of a bird imprisoned in the hearth and the old woman nibbled and mumbled in her sleep. Far, far away from Marshington was this firelit parlour. Muriel spoke timidly.
"Please, Mr. Todd, can I speak to you a minute?"
"Evidently. You see that. Ah cannot get away."
A certain broadening of the vowels betrayed William Todd's county, but he spoke with a readiness unusual among the tongue-tied farmers of the Riding, and possessed a command of language won from long reading of the Bible, dog-eared theological tracts, and a surprising quantity of the more easily acquired English classics.