“What case, Mr. Headstone? What is wanting to it?”
“You—you shall be informed in the other interview.” Then he said, as if in a burst of irrepressible despair, “I—I leave it all incomplete! There is a spell upon me, I think!” And then added, almost as if he asked for pity, “Good night!”
He held out his hand. As she, with manifest hesitation, not to say reluctance, touched it, a strange tremble passed over him, and his face, so deadly white, was moved as by a stroke of pain. Then he was gone.
The dolls’ dressmaker sat with her attitude unchanged, eyeing the door by which he had departed, until Lizzie pushed her bench aside and sat down near her. Then, eyeing Lizzie as she had previously eyed Bradley and the door, Miss Wren chopped that very sudden and keen chop in which her jaws sometimes indulged, leaned back in her chair with folded arms, and thus expressed herself:
“Humph! If he—I mean, of course, my dear, the party who is coming to court me when the time comes—should be that sort of man, he may spare himself the trouble. he wouldn’t do to be trotted about and made useful. He’d take fire and blow up while he was about it.”
“And so you would be rid of him,” said Lizzie, humouring her.
“Not so easily,” returned Miss Wren. “He wouldn’t blow up alone. He’d carry me up with him. I know his tricks and his manners.”
“Would he want to hurt you, do you mean?” asked Lizzie.
“Mightn’t exactly want to do it, my dear,” returned Miss Wren; “but a lot of gunpowder among lighted lucifer-matches in the next room might almost as well be here.”
“He is a very strange man,” said Lizzie, thoughtfully.