"I am not
silly enough to give way to it."
He went on again with his knife, and had presently cleared the
outlines of a stone that filled nearly all the side of the recess.
He paused.
"Go on! go on!" said Arctura.
"I must first get a better tool or two," answered Donal. "Will you
mind being left?"
"I can bear it. But do not be long. A few minutes may evaporate my
courage."
Donal hurried away to get a hammer and chisel, and a pail to put the
broken plaster in. Lady Arctura stood and waited. The silence closed
in upon her. She began to feel eerie. She felt as if she had but to
will and see through the wall to what lay beyond it. To keep herself
from so willing, she had all but reduced herself to mental inaction,
when she started to her feet with a smothered cry: a knock not over
gentle sounded on the door of the outer room. She darted to the
bedroom-door and flung it to--next to the press, and with one push
had it nearly in its place. Then she opened again the door, thinking
to wait for a second knock on the other before she answered. But as
she opened the inner, the outer door also opened--slowly--and a face
looked in. She would rather have had a visitor from behind the
press! It was her uncle; his face cadaverous; his eyes dull, but
with a kind of glitter in them; his look like that of a
housebreaker. In terror of himself, in terror lest he should
discover what they had been about, in terror lest Donal should
appear, wishing to warn the latter, and certain that, early as it
was, her uncle was not himself, with intuitive impulse, the moment
she saw him, she cried out,
"Uncle! what is that behind you?"
She felt afterwards, and was very sorry, that it was both a
deceitful and cruel thing to do; but she did it, as I have said, by
a swift, unreflecting instinct--which she concluded, in thinking
about it, came from the ready craft of some ancestor, and
illustrated what Donal had been saying.
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