as long as he wished.

"Thank you a thousand times. You are patience and kindness itself," he
said, going back to his former place and resuming his former gentleness
of manner. "Now that I have got over my first confession of the misery
that follows me in secret wherever I go, I think I can tell you calmly
all that remains to be told. You see, as I said, my Uncle Stephen" he
turned away his head quickly, and looked down at the table as the name
passed his lips--"my Uncle Stephen came twice to Wincot while I was a
child, and on both occasions frightened me dreadfully. He only took me
up in his arms and spoke to me--very kindly, as I afterward heard, for
_him_--but he terrified me, nevertheless. Perhaps I was frightened at
his great stature, his swarthy complexion, and his thick black hair and
mustache, as other children might have been; perhaps the mere sight of
him had some strange influence on me which I could not then understand
and cannot now explain. However it was, I used to dream of him long
after he had gone away, and to fancy that he was stealing on me to catch
me up in his arms whenever I was left in the dark. The servants who took
care of me found this out, and used to threaten me with my Uncle Stephen
whenever I was perverse and difficult to manage. As I grew up, I still
retained my vague dread and abhorrence of our absent relative. I always
listened intently, yet without knowing why, whenever his name was
mentioned by my father or my mother--listened with an unaccountable
presentiment that something terrible had happened to him, or was about
to happen to me. This feeling only changed when I was left alone in the
Abbey; and then it seemed to merge into the eager curiosity which had
begun to grow on me, rather before that time, about the origin of
the ancient prophecy predicting the extinction of our race. Are you
following me?"

"I follow every word with the closest attention."

"You must know, then, that I had first found out some fragments of
the old rhyme in which the prophecy occurs quoted as a curiosity in an
antiquarian book in the library. On the page opposite this quotation had
been pasted a rude old wood-cut, representing a dark-haired man, whose
face was so strangely like what I remembered of my Uncle Stephen that
the portrait absolutely startled me. When I asked my father about
this--it was then just before his death--he either knew, or pretended
to know, nothing of it; and when I afterward menti