Uncle
Silas. One day, perhaps, you will know him--yes, very well--and understand
how villains have injured him.

Then my father retired, and at the door he said--

'Mrs. Rusk, a word, if you please,' beckoning to that lady, who trotted
after him to the library.

I think he then laid some injunction upon the housekeeper, which was
transmitted by her to Mary Quince, for from that time forth I could never
lead either to talk with me about Uncle Silas. They let me talk on, but
were reserved and silent themselves, and seemed embarrassed, and Mrs. Rusk
sometimes pettish and angry, when I pressed for information.

Thus curiosity was piqued; and round the slender portrait in the leather
pantaloons and top-boots gathered many-coloured circles of mystery, and the
handsome features seemed to smile down upon my baffled curiosity with a
provoking significance.

Why is it that this form of ambition--curiosity--which entered into the
temptation of our first parent, is so specially hard to resist? Knowledge
is power--and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human
souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable
interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the
contumacious appetite.

CHAPTER III

_A NEW FACE_

I think it was about a fortnight after that conversation in which my father
had expressed his opinion, and given me the mysterious charge about the
old oak cabinet in his library, as already detailed, that I was one night
sitting at the great drawing-room window, lost in the melancholy reveries
of night, and in admiration of the moonlighted scene. I was the only
occupant of the room; and the lights near the fire, at its farther end,
hardly reached to the window at which I sat.

The shorn grass sloped gently downward from the windows till it met the
broad level on which stood, in clumps, or solitarily scattered, some of the
noblest timber in England. Hoar in the moonbeams stood those graceful
trees casting their moveless shadows upon the grass, and in the background
crowning the undulations of the distance, in masses, were piled those woods
among which lay the solitary tomb where the remains of my beloved mother
rested.

The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon,
and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a
scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in
the dream, and th