in the power
of a woman! It's sacrilege! By heaven, I'll throw my brother's will
into chancery rather!"

His rage was such as to compel her to think there must be more in it
than appeared. The wilderness of the temper she had roused made her
tremble, but it also woke the spirit of her race, and she repented of
the courtesy she had shown him: she had the right to make what
investigations she pleased! Her father would not have left her the
property without good reasons for doing so; and of those reasons some
might well have lain in the character of the man before her!

Through all this rage the earl read something of what had sent the
blood of the Graemes to her cheek and brow.

"I beg your pardon, my love," he said, "but if he was your father, he
was my brother!"

"He is my father!" said Arctura coldly.

"Dead and gone and all but forgotten!"

"No, my lord; not for one day forgotten! not for one moment unloved!"

"Ah, well, as you please! but because you love his memory must I regard
him as a Solon? 'T is surely no great treason to reflect upon the
wisdom of a dead man!"

"I wish you good day, my lord!" said Arctura, very angry, and left him.

But when presently she found that she could not lift up her heart to
her father in heaven, gladly would she have sent her anger from her.
Was it not plainly other than good, when it came thus between her and
the living God! All day at intervals she had to struggle and pray
against it; a great part of the night she lay awake because of it; but
at length she pitied her uncle too much to be very angry with him any
more, and so fell asleep.

In the morning she found that all sense of his having authority over
her had vanished, and with it her anger. She saw also that it was quite
time she took upon herself the duties of a landowner. What could Mr.
Grant think of her--doing nothing for her people! But she could do
little while her uncle received the rents and gave orders to Mr.
Graeme! She would take the thing into her own hands! In the meantime,
Mr. Grant should, if he pleased, go on quietly with his examination of
the house.

But she could not get her interview with her uncle out of her head, and
was haunted with vague suspicions of some dreadful secret about the
house belonging to the present as well as the past. Her uncle seemed to
have receded to a distance incalculable, and to have grown awful as he
receded. She was of a nature almost too delicately impressionable;