"Do I see it?" he cried; "_the room_ where the great Cavanagh thought and worked! It is a privilege not easily over-estimated." And he flitted from shelf to drawer, from drawer to table, with gusts of enthusiasm which made the cold, stern face of Hermione, who had taken up her stand in the doorway, harden into an expression of strange defiance. Emma, less filled with some dark memory, or more swayed by her anxiety to fathom his purposes, and read the secret of an intrusion which as yet was nothing but a troublous mystery to her, had entered the room with him, and stood quietly watching his erratic movements, as if she half expected him to abstract something from the hoard of old chemicals or collection of formulas above which he hung with such a pretence of rapture. "How good! how fine! how interesting!" broke in shrill ejaculation from his lips as he ambled hither and thither. But Emma noticed that his eye ever failed to dwell upon what was really choice or unique in the collection of her father's apparatus, and that when by chance he touched an alembic or lifted a jar, it was with an awkwardness that betrayed an unaccustomed hand. "You do not hold a retort in that way," she finally remarked, going up to him and taking the article in question out of his hand. "This is how my father was accustomed to handle them," she proceeded, and he, taken aback for the instant, blushed and murmured something about her father being his superior and she the very apt pupil of a great scholar and a very wise man. "You wanted to see the laboratory, and now you have seen it," quoth Hermione from her place by the door. "Is there anything else we can do for you?" The chill, stern tones seemed to rouse him and he turned towards the speaker. "No, no, my dear, no, no. You have been very good." But Emma noticed that his eyes still kept roaming here, there, and everywhere while he spoke, picking up information as a bird picks up worms. "What does he want?" thought she, looking anxiously towards her sister. "You have a very pleasant home," he now remarked, pausing at the head of those narrow stairs and peering into the nest of Hermione's own room, the door of which stood invitingly open. "Is that why you never leave it?" he unexpectedly asked, looking with his foxy eyes from one sister to the other. "I do not think it is necessary for us to answer you," said Emma, while Hermione, with a flash in her eye, motioned him imperiously down, saying as she slowly followed him: "Our friends do not consider it wise to touch upon that topic, how much more should a stranger hesitate before doing so?" And he, cowering beneath her commanding look and angry presence, seemed to think she was right in this and ventured no more, though his restless eyes were never still, and he appeared to count the very banisters as his hand slid down the railing, and to take in every worn thread that showed itself in the carpet over which his feet shuffled in almost undignified haste.