“I do refuse,” she said.

“Do you still tell me to go?”

“Yes.  Go—­and never come back.”

I walked to the door, waited a moment before I opened it, and turned round to look at her again.

“I may have news to bring you of Sir Percival which you don’t expect,” I said, “and in that case I shall come back.”

“There is no news of Sir Percival that I don’t expect, except——­”

She stopped, her pale face darkened, and she stole back with a quiet, stealthy, cat-like step to her chair.

“Except the news of his death,” she said, sitting down again, with the mockery of a smile just hovering on her cruel lips, and the furtive light of hatred lurking deep in her steady eyes.

As I opened the door of the room to go out, she looked round at me quickly.  The cruel smile slowly widened her lips—­she eyed me, with a strange stealthy interest, from head to foot—­an unutterable expectation showed itself wickedly all over her face.  Was she speculating, in the secrecy of her own heart, on my youth and strength, on the force of my sense of injury and the limits of my self-control, and was she considering the lengths to which they might carry me, if Sir Percival and I ever chanced to meet?  The bare doubt that it might be so drove me from her presence, and silenced even the common forms of farewell on my lips.  Without a word more, on my side or on hers, I left the room.

As I opened the outer door, I saw the same clergyman who had already passed the house once, about to pass it again, on his way back through the square.  I waited on the door-step to let him go by, and looked round, as I did so, at the parlour window.

Mrs. Catherick had heard his footsteps approaching, in the silence of that lonely place, and she was on her feet at the window again, waiting for him.  Not all the strength of all the terrible passions I had roused in that woman’s heart, could loosen her desperate hold on the one fragment of social consideration which years of resolute effort had just dragged within her grasp.  There she was again, not a minute after I had left her, placed purposely in a position which made it a matter of common courtesy on the part of the clergyman to bow to her for a second time.  He raised his hat once more.  I saw the hard ghastly face behind the window soften, and light up with gratified pride—­I saw the head with the grim black cap bend ceremoniously in return.  The clergyman had bowed to her, and in my presence, twice in one day!

IX

I Left the house, feeling that Mrs. Catherick had helped me a step forward, in spite of herself.  Before I had reached the turning which led out of the square, my attention was suddenly aroused by the sound of a closing door behind me.