And he smacked the quarto Prayer-book down upon the folio Bible with a sonorous bang, and glided out, furious, frightened, and taciturn, to the Salmon House.

He came upon Dangerfield again only half-a-dozen steps from the turn into the street.  He had just dismissed Martin, and was looking into a note in his pocket-book, and either did not see, or pretended not to see, the clerk.  But some one else saw and recognised Mr. Irons; and, as he passed, directed upon him a quick, searching glance.  It was Mr. Mervyn, who happened to pass that way.  Irons and Dangerfield, and the church-yard—­there was a flash of association in the group and the background which accorded with an old suspicion.  Dangerfield, indeed, was innocently reading a leaf in his red and gilt leather pocket-book, as I have said.  But Irons’s eyes met the glance of Mervyn, and contracted oddly, and altogether there gleamed out something indefinable in his look.  It was only for a second—­a glance and an intuition; and from that moment it was one of Mervyn’s immovable convictions, that Mr. Dangerfield knew something of Irons’s secret.  It was a sort of intermittent suspicion before—­now it was a monstrous, but fixed belief.

So Mr. Irons glided swiftly on to the Salmon House, where, in a dark corner, he drank something comfortable; and stalked back again to the holy pile, with his head aching, and the world round him like a wild and evil dream.

CHAPTER LXIV.

BEING A NIGHT SCENE, IN WHICH MISS GERTRUDE CHATTESWORTH, BEING ADJURED BY AUNT BECKY, MAKES ANSWER.

In Aunt Becky’s mind, the time could not be far off when the odd sort of relations existing between the Belmont family and Mr. Dangerfield must be defined.  The Croesus himself, indeed, was very indulgent.  He was assiduous and respectful; but he wisely abstained from pressing for an immediate decision, and trusted to reflection and to Aunt Becky’s good offices; and knew that his gold would operate by its own slow, but sure, gravitation.

At one time he had made up his mind to be peremptory—­and politely to demand an unequivocal ‘yes,’ or ‘no.’  But a letter reached him from London; it was from a great physician there.  Whatever was in it, the effect was to relieve his mind of an anxiety.  He never, indeed, looked anxious, or moped like an ordinary man in blue-devils.  But his servants knew when anything weighed upon his spirits, by his fierce, short, maniacal temper.  But with the seal of that letter the spell broke, the evil spirit departed for a while, and the old jocose, laconic irony came back, and glittered whitely in the tall chair by the fire, and sipped its claret after dinner, and sometimes smoked its long pipe and grinned into the embers of the grate.  At Belmont, there had been a skirmish over the broiled drum-sticks at supper, and the ladies had withdrawn in towering passions to their nightly devotions and repose.