He talked on about the pictures and the furniture until she became more natural.  It was impossible not to be interested in her work, and the decoration and furnishing of the whole house was her own doing, not that of any hireling adviser.  Then, too, he knew its history, and she became keenly interested.  She had at times a strong feeling of the past life still in possession of the house, into which her own strangely fated life had intruded.  She wanted, half-consciously, to know if her guilty secret was a desecration or only a continuance of something that had gone before.

Suddenly she leant forward with the crude simplicity he was glad to see again.

“Have there been any wicked people here?” Her voice was low and young.

“‘All houses in which men have lived and died are haunted houses,’” he quoted.  “It’s not very cynical to suppose that there has been sin and sorrow here before now.”

“I think,” said Molly quickly, “there was a wicked woman who used the little dining-room; perhaps she was only a guest.  I don’t think she went upstairs often.”

“Perhaps she came in with my looking-glasses,” suggested Edmund.  “I have often wished I could see what they have seen.”

Molly was now quite off her guard.

Edmund rose and examined some china on a table near him.

“Why are you so displeased with me?” he said, without any change of voice.

Molly sprang to her feet, careless whether her unguarded vehemence might betray her to his observation.

“I shall not answer that question,” she said; but he knew that she would answer it.

“You cut me at the Court; you were displeased at having to sit by me at dinner; you have pretended not to see me at least four times since then, and your butler showed me up by mistake.”

Molly had moved away from him to the window.  She knew she must speak or her conduct would look too like wounded love—­a thing quite unbearable.  She knew, too, that his influence would make her speak, and, besides that, something in her cried for the relief of speech.  She needed a fight although she did not know it; an open fight with an enemy she could see would distract her from the incessant fight with an enemy she did not see.

“You are a strange man!” she cried, holding the curtain behind her lightly as she turned towards him.  “You could make friends with me so that all the world might see you, and meanwhile, at the very same time, you were paying a low Italian scoundrel to produce lies against my sick and lonely mother!  You could watch me and get out of me all you wanted to know because I was ignorant of the world.  You could use the horrible influence you had gained over me by your experience of many women, to manage me as you liked.  You told me not to marry Edgar Tonmore for some reason of your own; you told me to go and stay with my aunt; you came to see me one night in London, and wormed out of me my relations with my unfortunate mother.  With all your knowledge of the world, with all your experience, did you never think I might come to find you out?”