"It may surprise you," she said presently, speaking with sudden passion, "but by right the Hall ought not to be mine, and I do not want it. I have never loved it because it has never for a moment seemed home to me, and our people have always appeared strangers upon the land. How we came here I do not know, but it has not suited us, and we have only disfigured a beauty into which we did not fit. Its very age is a reproach to us, for it shows off our newness--our lack of any past that we may call our own. Will might feel himself master here, but I cannot." Carraway took off his glasses and rubbed patiently at the ridge they had drawn across his nose. "And yet, why not?" he asked. "The place has been in your grandfather's possession now for more than twenty years." "For more than twenty years," repeated Maria scornfully, "and before that the Blakes lived here--how long?" He met her question squarely. "For more than two hundred." Without shifting her steady gaze which she turned upon his face, she leaned forward, clasping her hands loosely upon the knees. "There are things that I want to know, Mr. Carraway," she said, "many things, and I believe that you can tell me. Most of all, I want to know why we ever came to Blake Hall? Why the Blakes ever left it? And, above all, why they have hated us so heartily and so long?" She paused and sat motionless, while she hung with suspended breath upon his reply. For a moment the lawyer hesitated, nervously twirling his glasses between his thumb and forefinger; then he slowly shook his head and looked from her to the fire. "Twenty years are not as a day, despite your scorn, my dear young lady, and many facts become overlaid with fiction in a shorter time." "But you know something--and you believe still more." "God forbid that I should convert you to any belief of mine." She put out a protesting hand, her eyes still gravely insistent. "Tell me all--I demand it. It is my right; you must see that." "A right to demolish sand houses--to scatter old dust." "A right to hear the truth. Surely you will not withhold it from me?" "I don't know the truth, so I can't enlighten you. I know only the stories of both sides, and they resemble each other merely in that they both center about the same point of interest." "Then you will tell them to me--you must," she said earnestly. "Tell me first, word for word, all that the Blakes believe of us." With a laugh, he put on his glasses that he might bring her troubled face the more clearly before him. "A high spirit of impartiality, I admit," he observed. "That I should want to hear the other side?" "That, being a woman, you should take for granted the existence of the other side." She shook her head impatiently. "You can't evade me by airing camphor-scented views of my sex," she returned. "What I wish to know--and I still stick to my point, you see--is the very thing you are so carefully holding back."