Nan recoiled, stricken but roused. "You hurt me once by reminding me of things," she said quickly, in a low and passionate voice. "Don't hurt me more by forcing me to remind you of them. We made our own arrangement in the after saloon on board the _Memnon_ when we said good-bye. It has nothing to do with anybody else, and nobody else can say a word against him if I do not." "And don't you?" he cried. "And do you mean to say you don't?" "Not a syllable," said the girl. "He has done the honest thing." "The honest thing!" "He could not pretend if he would." "And you don't despise him for it--you have no contempt for him?" Nan looked steadily on her father's horror. "I honour him for it, as I always have," she said. CHAPTER XXIV DEATH'S DOOR Chip, chip, chip, rang the driving-pick along the top of the drive, as it pricked its way from left to right, leaving a chain of holes in the rude right-angle under the arch; and chip, chip, back the other way, between the holes, till they united in one curved crevice, wherein the fingers could be passed from wall to wall, and the continued stability of the roof felt with the knuckles. Then a spell of harder and less cautious hitting, an interval of falling chunk and showering gravel, a period of irritation to throat and eyes. Presently a downward stroke, with more power behind it the lower one got; and in the end an advance from top to bottom of as many inches as the introductory crevice had been deep. So slaved Denis in his drive; so was he slaving when Jewson just heard him from above, on the 7th of February, 1854. It meant lying prone in the earth by the hour together, an elbow pillowed in the morning's débris, the body aching in every inch. It meant a complete skin of the mud of dust and dirt and copious perspiration. It meant an atmosphere heated and poisoned by the flame of a single candle, a tickling throat, a trickling eye, an intermittent rigour of the lower limbs, a daily foretaste of paralysis. But it also meant a continuous excitement and an enduring satisfaction which to Denis were worth all these evils at once and at their worst. The drift was as rich as ever; and now it needed neither pan nor cradle to tell him so. He knew it at a glance, knew it by the light of his solitary candle. So far the wash-dirt had yielded a little more or a little less to the tub; its outward characteristics had not altered; but they always might. At any moment, after the next blow with the driving-pick, or the next--or the next--a change might be observable. It could hardly be a change for the better; thus each unchanged handful was to the good, and the uncertainty of every minute its fascination. Leads and gutters were notoriously capricious, and Denis was prepared for any caprice but the one that he encountered this very morning.