At once impressed and embarrassed at
this crowning incongruity, her pretty lips trembled between a smile and
a cry as she said, "Good-night," and slipped away into the darkness.
Erect and grotesque De Ferrieres retained the same attitude until the
sound of her footsteps was lost, when he slowly began to close the
door. But a strong arm arrested it from without, and a large carpeted
foot appeared at the bottom of the narrowing opening. The door yielded,
and Mr. Abner Nott entered the room.
IV.
With an exclamation and a hurried glance around him, De Ferrieres threw
himself before the intruder. But slowly lifting his large hand, and
placing it on his lodger's breast, he quietly overbore the sick man's
feeble resistance with an impact of power that seemed almost as moral
as it was physical. He did not appear to take any notice of the room or
its miserable surroundings; indeed, scarcely of the occupant. Still
pushing him, with abstracted eyes and immobile face, to the chair that
Rosey had just quitted, he made him sit down, and then took up his own
position on the pile of cushions opposite.
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