At this, covering her face with her coldly nervous hands, she said, brokenly:
"God help me, I am driven by the winds, and tossed; I must sleep on it to-night, and if I feel strong enough, tell you all to-morrow."
"That's right, and to insure your being brave enough, you must take the best tonic, sleep; so let us mount," she said affectionately, rising and taking her friend's arm.
"Very well, dear; and the dropping rain shall be my lullaby in wooing the god of slumber."
CHAPTER XII.
ON THE RACK.
It was no heated fancy of a half-delirious brain of our poor friend, Cole, that he had heard a tap on the gloomy door of the east chamber, at Broadlawns, on the night he was snared by the huntress; held by the fetters of a loveless union with Margaret Villiers; but he paid no heed to the stealthy tap, repeated whenever the revelry below was loudest; but as silent as the grave, he almost holds his breath as he watches the door, a look of agony in his tired eyes, which throb as does his head in neuralgic torture; but now, his strange midnight visitor, as if driven to desperation by his silence, says through the keyhole:
"For heaven's sake, let me in!"
But no response; he will trust no one under the roof of this hateful place, to which he has been trapped, in which he has lost his freedom, in which the terrible conviction has seized him that he is going to be laid low by the fell hand of sickness. What is that? Yes, he sees a slip of paper passed under the door; his midnight visitor is evidently bent on obtaining an interview; pale as a ghost, and trembling in every limb, he creeps noiselessly to the door, picks up the paper, and reads the following words: