comes down almost to your heels--it does.'

And she glanced from mine to hers, and made a little kick up with the heel
of the navvy boot to assist her in measuring the comparative distance.

'Maybe mine's a thought too short?' she suggested. 'Who's there? Oh! it's
you, is it?' she cried as Mother Hubbard appeared at the door. 'Come in,
L'Amour--don't you know, lass, you're always welcome?'

She had come to let us know that Uncle Silas would be happy to see me
whenever I was ready; and that my cousin Millicent would conduct me to the
room where he awaited me.

In an instant all the comic sensations awakened by my singular cousin's
eccentricities vanished, and I was thrilled with awe. I was about to see
in the flesh--faded, broken, aged, but still identical--that being who had
been the vision and the problem of so many years of my short life.

CHAPTER XXXII

_UNCLE SILAS_

I thought my odd cousin was also impressed with a kind of awe, though
different in degree from mine, for a shade overcast her face, and she was
silent as we walked side by side along the gallery, accompanied by the
crone who carried the candle which lighted us to the door of that apartment
which I may call Uncle Silas's presence chamber.

Milly whispered to me as we approached--

'Mind how you make a noise; the governor's as sharp as a weasel, and
nothing vexes him like that.'

She was herself toppling along on tiptoe. We paused at a door near the head
of the great staircase, and L'Amour knocked timidly with her rheumatic
knuckles.

A voice, clear and penetrating, from within summoned us to enter. The old
woman opened the door, and the next moment I was in the presence of Uncle
Silas.

At the far end of a handsome wainscoted room, near the hearth in which a
low fire was burning, beside a small table on which stood four waxlights,
in tall silver candlesticks, sat a singular-looking old man.

The dark wainscoting behind him, and the vastness of the room, in the
remoter parts of which the light which fell strongly upon his face and
figure expended itself with hardly any effect, exhibited him with the
forcible and strange relief of a finely painted Dutch portrait. For some
time I saw nothing but him.

A face like marble, with a fearful monumental look, and, for an old man,
singularly vivid strange eyes, the singularity of which rather grew upon me
as I looked; for his eyebrows were still black, though his hair descended
from his t