with an
indefinable character that was not only repulsive but formidable.

Mrs. Marston's feelings with respect to this person were still further
disturbed by the half-conveyed hints and innuendoes of her own maid, who
never lost an opportunity of insinuating her intense dislike of the
Frenchwoman, and appeared perpetually to be upon the very verge of making
some explicit charges, or some shocking revelations, respecting her,
which, however, she as invariably evaded; and even when Mrs. Marston once
or twice insisted upon her explaining her meaning distinctly, she eluded
her mistress's desire, and left her still in the same uneasy uncertainty.

Marston, on his part, however much his conduct might tend to confirm
suspicion, certainly did nothing to dissipate the painful and undefined
apprehension respecting himself, which Mademoiselle de Barras, with such
malign and mysterious industry, labored to raise. His spirits and temper
were liable to strange fluctuations. In the midst of that excited gaiety,
to which, until lately, he had been so long a stranger, would sometimes
intervene paroxysms of the blackest despair, all the ghastlier for the
contrast, and with a suddenness so abrupt and overwhelming, that one
might have fancied him crossed by the shadow of some terrific apparition.
Sometimes for a whole day, or even more, he would withdraw himself from
the society of his family, and, in morose and moody solitude, take his
meals alone in his library, and steal out unattended to wander among the
thickets and glades of his park. Sometimes, again, he would sit for hours
in the room which had been Sir Wynston's, and, with a kind of horrible
resolution, often loiter there till after nightfall. In such hours, the
servants would listen with curious awe, as they heard his step, pacing
to and fro, in that deserted and inauspicious chamber, while his voice,
in broken sentences, was also imperfectly audible, as if maintaining a
muttered dialogue. These eccentric practices gradually invested him, in
the eyes of his domestics, with a certain preternatural mystery, which
enhanced the fear with which they habitually regarded him, and was
subsequently confirmed by his giving orders to have the furniture taken
out of the ominous suite of rooms, and the doors nailed up and secured.
He gave no reason for this odd and abrupt measure, and gossip of course
reported that the direction had originated in his having encountered the
specter of the mu