"No, no; sit down again for a few minutes. I will not detain you long, and I will endeavour not to press unwelcome questions upon you. In all human probability this is the last opportunity we shall have of speaking together; for even supposing that at some future time you should yourself desire to volunteer explanations which you now withhold from me, you will not know how to communicate with me." "Is it your intention to leave Rosemullion, sir?" "I shall make speedy arrangements to quit it for ever. It has not been so filled with light and love as to become endeared to me. I shall leave it not only willingly but with pleasure, and I shall never again set foot in it." "There is no saying what may happen in the course of life, sir. Have you made up your mind where you are going to live?" "In no settled place. I shall travel." "Change of scene will be good for you, sir. It is altogether the best thing you could do." "Of that," I said impatiently, "I am the best judge. My future life can be of no interest to you. It is of the past I wish to speak. Have you any objection to inform me for how long you have been in my mother's service?" "You were but a little over two years of age, sir, at the time I entered it." "For nearly twenty years, then. You do not look old, Mrs. Fortress." "I am forty-two, sir." "Then you were twenty-three when you came to us?" "Yes, sir." "We were poor at the time, and were living in common lodgings in London?" "That is so, sir." "My father's means were so straitened, if my memory does not betray me, that every shilling of our income had to be reckoned. You did not--excuse me for the question, Mrs. Fortress--you did not serve my parents for love?" "No, sir; it was purely a matter of business between your father and me." "You are--again I beg you to excuse me--not the kind of person to work for nothing, or even for small wages." "Your father paid me liberally, sir." "And yet we were so poor that until we came suddenly and unexpectedly into a fortune, my father could never afford to give me a shilling. Truly your duties must have been no ordinary ones that you should have been engaged under such circumstances. It is, I suppose, useless for me to ask for an explanation of the nature of those duties?" "Quite useless, sir." "Will you tell me nothing, Mrs. Fortress, that will throw light upon the dark spaces of my life?" "I have nothing to tell, sir." To a man less under control than myself this iteration of unwillingness would have been intolerable, but I knew that nothing was to be gained by giving way to anger. I should have been the sufferer and the loser by it. "Looking down, Mrs. Fortress, upon the dead body of my mother, you made the remark that it was a happy release." "Death is to all a happy release, sir." "A common platitude, which does not deceive me." "You cannot forget, sir, that your mother was a great sufferer."