‘No—I want to be alone. Do you grudge me quiet? Must I live under a microscope? Must I have everything I do marked, every word noted? Why do you peer in here? Am I an escaped felon to be guarded? Am I likely to break out? Will you leave me? I tell you I do not want you here. I desire solitude. I have had you and Coyshe and Eve jabbering here till my head spins and my temples are bursting. Leave me alone.’ Then, with the craftiness of incipient derangement, he said, ‘I have had two—three bad nights, and want sleep. I was dozing in my chair when Jane came in to light a fire. I sent her out. Then, when I was nodding off again, I heard cook or Jasper tramping through the hall. That roused me, and now when I hoped to compose myself again, you thrust yourself upon me; are you all in a league to drive me mad, by forbidding me sleep? That is how Hopkins, the witch-finder, got the poor wretches to confess. He would not suffer them to sleep, and at last, in sheer madness and hunger for rest, they confessed whatever was desired of them. You want to force something out of me. That is why you will not let me sleep.’ ‘Papa dear, I shall be so glad if you can sleep. I promise you shall be left quite alone for an hour.’ ‘O—an hour! limited to sixty minutes.’ ‘Dear papa, till you rap on the wall, to intimate that you are awake.’ ‘You will not pry and peer?’ ‘No one shall come near you. I will forbid everyone the hall, lest a step on the pavement should disturb you.’ ‘What are you doing there?’ ‘Taking away your razor, papa.’ Then he burst into a shrill, bitter laugh—a laugh that shivered through her heart. He said nothing, but remained chuckling in his chair. ‘I dare say Jasper will sharpen them for you, papa, he is very kind,’ said Barbara, ashamed of her dissimulation. So it came about that the old half-crazy squire was left in the gathering gloom entirely alone and unguarded. Nothing could do him more good than a refreshing sleep, Barbara argued, and went away to her own room, where she lit a candle, drew down her blind, and set herself to needlework. She had done what she could. The pantry adjoined the room of her father. Jane would hear if he knocked or called. She did not know that Jane was gone. Ignatius Jordan sat in the armchair, biting at his stick, or beating in the air with it at the blots which troubled his vision. These black spots took various shapes; sometimes they were bats, sometimes falling leaves. Then it appeared to him as if a fluid that was black but with a crimson glow in it as of a subdued hidden fire was running and dripped from ledge to ledge—invisible ledges they were—in the air before him. He put his stick out to touch the stream, and then it ran along the stick and flowed on his hand and he uttered a cry, because it burned him. He held his hand up open before him, and thought the palm was black, but with glowing red veins intersecting the blackness, and he touched the lines with the finger of his left hand.