opening into the quadrangle, save that door by which she had entered,
and which was securely defended by a barricade of straw that had been
doubled by a fresh delivery of trusses since she first saw it. But while
she was prowling about the sweet-scented stable, much disappointed at
the result of her investigations, she stumbled against a ladder which
led to an open trap-door. Mary mounted the ladder, and found herself
amidst the dusty atmosphere of a large hayloft, half in shadow, half in
the hot bright sunlight. A large shutter was open in the sloping roof,
the roof that sloped towards the quadrangle, an open patch admitting
light and air. Mary, light and active as a squirrel, sprang upon a truss
of hay, and in another moment had swung herself in the opening of the
shutter, and was standing with her feet on the wooden ledge at the
bottom of the massive frame, and her figure supported against the slope
of thick thatched roof. Perched, or half suspended, thus, she was just
high enough to look over the top of the yew-tree hedge into the circle
round the sundial.

Yes, there was the unhappy victim of fate, and man's inhumanity to man.
There sat the shrunken figure, with drooping head, and melancholy
attitude--the bent shoulders of feeble old age, the patriarchal locks so
appealing to pity. There he sat with eyes poring upon the ground just as
she had seen him the first time. And while she had sat with him and
talked with him he had seemed to awaken out of that dull despondency,
gleams of pleasure had lighted up his wrinkled face--he had grown
animated, a sentient living instead of a corpse alive. It was very hard
that this little interval of life, these stray gleams of gladness should
be denied to the poor old creature, at the behest of James Steadman.

Mary would have felt less angrily upon the subject had she believed in
Steadman's supreme carefulness of her own safety; but in this she did
not believe. She looked upon the house-steward's prudence as a
hypocritical pretence, an affectation of fidelity and wisdom, by which
he contrived to gratify the evil tendencies of his own hard and cruel
nature. For some reasons of his own, perhaps constrained thereto by
necessity, he had given the old man an asylum for his age and infirmity:
but while thus giving him shelter he considered him a burden, and from
mere perversity of mind refused him all such consolations as were
possible to his afflicted state, mewed him up as a prisoner