“My grandfather was noble and good, and he was all I had in this world.”

“And you can not forgive a man who happened to be rude to him?”

“If you please, Mr. Murray, I would rather go now.  I have given you your book, and that is all I came for.”

“Which means that you are afraid of me, and want to get out of my sight?”

She did not deny it, but her face flushed painfully.

“Edna Earl, you are at least honest and truthful, and those are rare traits at the present day.  I thank you for preserving and returning my Dante.  Did you read any of it?”

“Yes, sir, all of it.  Good-night, sir.”

“Wait a moment.  When did Aaron Hunt die?”

“Two months after you saw him.”

“You have no relatives?  No cousins, uncles, aunts?”

“None that I ever heard of.  I must go, sir.”

“Good-night, child.  For the present, when you go out in the grounds, be sure that wolf, Ali, is chained up, or you may be sorry that I did not cut his throat, as I am still inclined to do.”

She closed the door, ran lightly across the rotunda, and regaining her own room, felt inexpressibly relieved that the ordeal was over—­ that in future there remained no necessity for her to address one whose very tones made her shudder, and the touch of whose hand filled her with vague dread and loathing.

When the echo of her retreating footsteps died away, St. Elmo threw his cigar out of the window, and walked up and down the quaint and elegant rooms, whose costly bizarrerie would more appropriately have adorned a villa of Parthenope or Lucanian Sybaris, than a country-house in soi-disant “republican” America.  The floor, covered in winter with velvet carpet, was of white and black marble, now bare and polished as a mirror, reflecting the figure of the owner as he crossed it.  Oval ormolu tables, buhl chairs, and oaken and marquetrie cabinets, loaded with cameos, intaglios, Abraxoids, whose “erudition” would have filled Mnesarchus with envy, and challenged the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of Polycrates; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the universality of what St. Elmo called his “world-scrapings,” and to the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector.  On a verd-antique table lay a satin cushion holding a vellum Ms., bound in blue velvet, whose uncial letters were written in purple ink, powdered with gold-dust, while the margins were stiff with gilded illuminations; and near the cushion, as if prepared to shed light on the curious cryptography, stood an exquisite white glass lamp, shaped like a vase, and richly ornamented with Arabic inscriptions in ultra-marine blue—­a precious relic of some ruined Laura in the Nitrian desert, by the aid of whose rays the hoary hermits, whom St. Macarius ruled, broke the midnight gloom chanting, “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison,” fourteen hundred years before St. Elmo’s birth.  Immediately