.

As was common in the place, the front door yielded when the handle was
turned. Eliza had no wish to summon the housekeeper. She stood in the
inner hall and listened, that she might hear what rooms had inmates.
From the kitchen came occasional clinking of cups and plates; the
housekeeper had evidently not swerved from her regular work. With ears
preternaturally acute, Eliza hearkened to the silence in the other rooms
till some slight sound, she could hardly tell of what, led her upstairs
to a certain door. She did not knock; she had no power to stand there
waiting for a response; the primitive manners of the log house in which
she had lived so long were upon her. She entered the room abruptly,
roughly, as she would have entered the log house door.

In a long chair lay the man she sought. He was dressed in common
ill-fitting clothes; he lay as only the very weak lie, head and limbs
visibly resting on the support beneath them.

She crossed her arms and stood there, fierce and defiant. She was
conscious of the dignity of her pose, of her improved appearance and of
her fine clothes; the consciousness formed part of her defiance. But he
did not even see her mood, just as, manlike, he did not see her dress.
All that he did see was that here, in actual life before him, was the
girl he had lost. In his weakness he bestirred himself with a cry of
fond wondering joy--"Sissy!"

"Yes, Mr. Bates, I'm here."

Some power came to him, for he sat erect, awed and reverent before this
sudden delight that his eyes were drinking in. "Are you safe, Sissy?" he
whispered.

"Yes," she replied, scornfully, "I've been quite safe ever since I got
away from you, Mr. Bates. I've taken care of myself, so I'm quite safe
and getting on finely; but I'd get on better if my feet weren't tied in
a sack because of the things you made me do--you _made_ me do it, you
know you did." She challenged his self-conviction with fierce intensity.
"It was you made me go off and leave your aunt before you'd got any one
else to take care of her; it was you who made me take her money because
you'd give me none that was lawfully my own; it was you that made me run
away in a way that wouldn't seem very nice if any one knew, and do
things they wouldn't think very nice, and--and" (she was incoherent in
her passion) "you _made_ me run out in the woods alone, till I could get
a train, and I was so frightened of you coming, and finding me, and
_telling_, that I had to