His face darkened when he found out who I was.

"Young, personally attractive, and a great landowner," he said. I saw you just now talking familiarly with Cristel Toller. I didn't like that at the time; I like it less than ever now."

My pencil asked him, without ceremony, what he meant.

He was ready with his reply. "I mean this: you owe something to the good luck which has placed you where you are. Keep your familiarity for ladies in your own rank of life."

This (to a young man like me) was unendurable insolence. I had hitherto refrained from taking him at his own bitter word in the matter of nick-name. In the irritation of the moment, I now first resolved to adopt his suggestion seriously. The next slip of paper that I handed to him administered the smartest rebuff that my dull brains could discover on the spur of the moment: "The Cur is requested to keep his advice till he is asked for it."

For the first time, something like a smile showed itself faintly on his lips--and represented the only effect which my severity had produced. He still followed his own train of thought, as resolutely and as impertinently as ever.

"I haven't seen you talking to Cristel before to-night. Have you been meeting her in secret?"

In justice to the girl, I felt that I ought to set him right, so far. Taking up the pencil again, I told this strange man that I had just returned to England, after an absence of many years in foreign countries--that I had known Cristel when we were both children--and that I had met her purely by accident, when he had detected us talking outside the cottage. Seeing me pause, after advancing to that point in the writing of my reply, he held out his hand impatiently for the paper. I signed him to wait, and added a last sentence: "Understand this; I will answer no more questions--I have done with the subject."

He read what I had written with the closest attention. But his inveterate suspicion of me was not set at rest, even yet.

"Are you likely to come this way again?" he asked.

I pointed to the final lines of my writing, and got up to go.

This assertion of my will against his roused him. He stopped me at the door--not by a motion of his hand but by the mastery of his look. The dim candlelight afforded me no help in determining the color of his eyes. Dark, large, and finely set in his head, there was a sinister passion in them, at that moment, which held me in spite of myself. Still as monotonous as ever, his voice in some degree expressed the frenzy that was in him, by suddenly rising in its pitch when he spoke to me next.

"Mr. Roylake, I love her. Mr. Roylake, I am determined to marry her. Any man who comes between me and that cruel girl--ah, she's as hard as one of her father's millstones; it's the misery of my life, it's the joy of my life, to love her--I tell you, young sir, any man who comes between Cristel and me does it at his peril. Remember that."

I had no wish to give offence--but his threatening me in this manner was so absurd that I gave way to the impression of the moment, and laughed. He stepped up to me, with such an expression of demoniacal rage and hatred in his face that he became absolutely ugly in an instant.

"I amuse you, do I?" he said. "You don't know the man you're trifling with. You had better know me. You shall know me." He turned away, and walked up and down the wretched little room, deep in thought. "I don't want this matter between us to end badly," he said, interrupting his meditations--then returning to them again--and then once more addressing me. "You're young, you're thoughtless; but you don't look like a bad fellow. I wonder whether I can trust you? Not one man in a thousand would do it.