“Whisht! he is stirring! Hark to his step overhead!”
Cuddie and his basket were past the threshold, the door was closed, and Effie bending over her work before uncle Christopher’s night-capped head appeared from the stairs.
“I thought I heard Walter?” said he. “I thought Walter had come home?”
Walter was not to be home till the middle of the next day, the old man was reminded.
So he had thought; but he had been dreaming, it seemed to him for hours, of a weary sobbing,—the deep sobbing of a man near him; and when he woke up from his dream, there was a gleam from the keyhole on the ceiling; and he next fancied he heard whispers below, so he got up, and partly dressed himself, and came down——
“And found me just finishing my work, that I was bent upon doing before I went to bed,” said Effie.
“You are not going to sit up much later, child? If you must watch, you might as well occupy your watch with holy things.”
Effie thought of the times when Christopher used to spend half the night in perfecting the invention which had enabled him to gather a good many carnal comforts about him. She merely said that she was working for her husband. She would just lock the chain of the boat——
“What! that not done yet? I heard the chain clank just now. Nor the door fastened, I declare! You are a braver woman than your mother, child.”
Effie did not know that she had anything to fear. Her uncle feared rheumatism, and therefore hastened to bed again, before she went down to the boat with her lantern.