One thing was certain, however, and he could not help admitting it to himself, that, during their short and singular dialogue, she had, he knew not how, obtained and exercised an extraordinary ascendency over him.

He looked after her, but she was proceeding calmly along, precisely as if they had not spoken.
"She is certainly the greatest mystery in the shape of woman," he said to himself, as he proceeded, "that I have ever yet met--that is, if she be a thing of flesh and blood--for to me she seems to belong more to death and its awful accessories, than to life and its natural reality.
How in the devil's name could she have known that I locked that obstinate and undutiful girl up.

This is altogether inexplicable, upon principles affecting only the ordinary powers of common humanity.

Then she affirmed, prophesied, or what you will, that Lucy and Dunroe will be married--willingly and happily! That certainly is strange, and as agreeable as strange; but I will doubt nothing after the incident of the locking up, so strangely revealed to me too, at a moment when, perhaps, no human being knew it but Lucy and myself.

And, what is stranger still, she knows the state of the girl's affections, and that she at present detests Dunroe.