the
madman's version.

After Mad Jeremy had come back from watching his master carefully into
the house of the bailiff, he visited Elsie, and spoke the words, little
reassuring, which I have already written down.

Then going up to the great parlour, out of which opened Mr. Stennis's
weaving-room, he lit a lire of wood, which burned with much cheerful
blaze. In front of this he sat down, with his fiddle in his hand. He
had only drawn the bow across it, and began to tune up when his master
walked in.

Possibly the noise irritated Hobby Stennis's none too steady nerves.
Possibly, also, he was nettled at Jeremy's insistent request for the
loan of a couple of sovereigns in order to go down and "price" the new
cargo of melodeons received at Yarrow's, in the village. They had been
ordered by my father before his disappearance, to satisfy a temporary
local musical fever, and had only just arrived.

How exactly the thing happened is not known, but, at any rate, it is
certain that Mr. Stennis refused to give Jeremy a farthing for any such
purpose, and at the first sullen retort of the madman, turned fiercely
upon him, wrenched from his hands the violin on which he had been
fitfully playing and threw it on the fire. As the light dry wood
caught and the varnish crackled, Mr. Stennis strode off, fuming, to his
weaving-room to calm himself with a turn at the famous hand-loom. He
sat down before it, and as the shuttle began to pass back and forth,
his passion fell away in proportion as the fascination of the perfect
handicraft gained on him.

But Jeremy stood gazing fixedly at the burning fiddle till the last
clear flame died out, and in the great fireplace only a double couch of
red ashes preserved the shape of a violin.

But, meantime, in the weaving-room the shuttle said _click-clack_ in
the great silence which seemed to have fallen all of a sudden upon Deep
Moat Grange. In the red light, Jeremy stood erect, gazing entranced at
the shape of his beloved instrument outlined on the hearth, and
following one by one with his forefinger the ridged weals, from his
cheek to his forehead and back again. And all about the twilight fell
suddenly dim.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALLING OF ELSIE

Now, upon this very night of Saturday, the tenth of February, the same
upon which Mr. Ablethorpe had come to see me, Elsie had lighted her
candle early. Jeremy had been generous in the matter of lighting,
though more than once he ha