and then replied:

‘You remember our last conversation about papa? It was not long after that — not more than two or three days — when he gave me the first intimation of what I tell you.

It was sad to see him struggling between his desire to represent it to me as a matter of choice on his part, and his inability to conceal that it was forced upon him. I felt very sorry.’

‘Forced upon him, Agnes! Who forces it upon him?’

‘Uriah,’ she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘has made himself indispensable to papa. He is subtle and watchful. He has mastered papa’s weaknesses, fostered them, and taken advantage of them, until — to say all that I mean in a word, Trotwood, — until papa is afraid of him.’