Drawing a chair into a recess, I sat down with folded hands, calmly awaiting the arrival of my master. Once or twice a fearful yell rang through the house, or the rattling of chains, and curses uttered in a deep, manly voice, broke upon the oppressive stillness. I began to feel my soul rising with the emergency of the moment. “You look alarmed, miss. You don’t hear anything, my dear, do you?” asked the housekeeper nervously. “Nothing whatever,” I remarked calmly, as a terrific scream, followed by the dragging of chairs and tables in the room above, drowned for a moment my reply. “It is the silence, on the contrary, which has made me foolishly nervous.” The housekeeper looked at me approvingly, and instantly made some tea for me. I drank seven cups; as I was beginning the eighth, I heard a crash, and the next moment a man leaped into the room through the broken window. CHAPTER III The crash startled me from my self-control. The housekeeper bent toward me and whispered,— “Don’t be excited. It’s Mr. Rawjester,—he prefers to come in sometimes in this way. It’s his playfulness, ha! ha! ha!” “I perceive,” I said calmly. “It’s the unfettered impulse of a lofty soul breaking the tyrannizing bonds of custom.” And I turned toward him. He had never once looked at me. He stood with his back to the fire, which set off the herculean breadth of his shoulders. His face was dark and expressive; his under jaw squarely formed, and remarkably heavy. I was struck with his remarkable likeness to a gorilla. As he absently tied the poker into hard knots with his nervous fingers, I watched him with some interest. Suddenly he turned toward me:— “Do you think I’m handsome, young woman?” “Not classically beautiful,” I returned calmly; “but you have, if I may so express myself, an abstract manliness,—a sincere and wholesome barbarity which, involving as it does the naturalness”—But I stopped, for he yawned at that moment,—an action which singularly developed the immense breadth of his lower jaw,—and I saw he had forgotten me. Presently he turned to the housekeeper,— “Leave us.” The old woman withdrew with a curtsey. Mr. Rawjester deliberately turned his back upon me and remained silent for twenty minutes. I drew my shawl the more closely around my shoulders and closed my eyes. “You are the governess?” at length he said. “I am, sir.” “A creature who teaches geography, arithmetic, and the use of the globes—ha!—a wretched remnant of femininity,—a skimp pattern of girlhood with a premature flavor of tea-leaves and morality. Ugh!” I bowed my head silently. “Listen to me, girl!” he said sternly; “this child you have come to teach—my ward—is not legitimate. She is the offspring of my mistress,—a common harlot. Ah! Miss Mix, what do you think of me now?”