Explore "The Nether Millstone" by Fred M. White on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Vincent Dashwood seemed to expand, he stood there smiling benignly, he had lost his strange uneasiness of manner altogether. And yet Mary did not fail to notice the furtive look in his eyes. There must be something wrong here, she thought; it was impossible to regard this man as the head of the family. For three hundred years Dashwood had been ruled by a gentleman, a man of honour.
And this smirking creature, with the red, grinning face and cunning eyes, was neither. Mary knew him to be little better than a blackmailer. And if he was the person he claimed to be, why had he not come forward and proclaimed his identity before? She could not believe that Vincent Dashwood had hidden his light under a bushel merely because he was short of one particular document.