"You ask that?" he laughed, mockingly. "How remote this spot must be to be where the breath of scandal does not blow. You ask that? Why, 'fore heaven, I supposed that jealousy quickened and sharpened ears, but yours must be singularly blunt, or, mayhap, deadened by indifference." "Tell me plainly what you have to say." "Do you not know that your Anthony was engaged, or all but engaged--had been for some fifteen years--to my sister? Then he saw you under remarkable circumstances, saw and attended you along the Lyke Way that night of the fire on the moor. Then a spark of the wild fire fell into his blood, and he forgot his old, established first love, and in a mad humour took you. Take a scale," pursued Fox. "Put in one shell my sister with her wealth, her civilized beauty, her heritage, the grand old house of Kilworthy, and her representation of a grand old line. Put in also"--he suited the action to his word, in imaginary scales in the air before him, and saw the shrink of Urith's feet at each item he named--"put in also his father's favor, Hall--where he was born and bred, the inheritance of his family for many generations, with its associations, his sister's company, the respect of his neighbours; all that and more that I have not named into the one shell, and into the other.--Come, come!"--he crooked his finger, and made a sign with his knuckle, and a distorted face full of mockery and malice--"come, skip in and sit yourself down with a couple of paniers of peat earth, that grows only rushes. What say you? Do you outweigh Julian and all the rest? And your peat earth, sour and barren, does that sink your scale heavier than all the bags of gold and rich warm soil of Kilworthy and Hall combined?" He glanced upward hurriedly, to see what effect his words had. All this that he said Urith had said it to herself; but though the same thoughts uttered to herself cut her like razors, they were as razors dipped in poison, when coming articulate from the lips of Fox. "Do you not suppose," continued he, "that after the first fancy was over, Anthony wearied of you, and went back in heart out from this wilderness, back to Goshen and to the Land of Promise rolled into one, with the flesh-pots, and without hard labour? Of course he did. He were a fool if he did not, or your hold over him must be magical indeed, and the value of Willsworthy altogether extraordinary." Again he furtively looked at her. Her eyes were off him, he felt it, before he saw it. She was looking down at the floor, and her teeth were fastened into her clenched hands. She was biting them to keep under the hysteric paroxysm that was coming over her. He took a malevolent delight in lashing her to a frenzy with his cruel words, and so avenging himself on her for his rejection, avenging himself on her in the most terrible way possible, by making her relations with her husband henceforth intolerable.