"Nay, I will go."
"You are still weak. Remain in peace upon the couch, dear Tobias, and I will go for you."
Before she left the room, she kissed the forehead of the boy. A tear, too, fell upon his hand.
"Who knows," she thought, "that I shall ever see him in life again?"
"Minna, you weep."
"Weep? No—no—I am so—so happy."
She hastily left the room. Todd had heard what had passed, and had turned to hide himself again. The young girl knew that she passed the murderer within a hair's breadth. She knew that he had but to stretch out his right hand and say—"Minna Gray, you are my victim!" and his victim she would have become. Was not that dreadful? And she so young and so fair—so upon the threshold, as it were, of the garden of her existence—so loving, and so well-beloved. She felt for a moment, as she crossed the landing—just for a moment as though she were going mad. But the eye of the Omnipotent was upon that house. She staggered on. She made her way into a bed-room. It was the colonel's. Above the mantel-shelf, supported on a small bracket, was a pair of pistols. They were of a large size, and she had heard from the current gossip of the house, how they were always loaded, and how the servants feared to touch them, and how even they shrank from making the bed, lest the pistol from some malice aforethought, or from something incidental to such watching, should go off at once of their own accord, and inevitably shoot whoever chanced to be in the room. Minna Gray laid her hand upon the dreaded weapons.
"For Tobias! for Tobias!" she gasped.
Then she paused to listen. All was still as the grave. Todd was not yet ready for the murder, or he wished to take their lives both together, and in the one room. That was more probable. Then she began to think that he must have some suspicion, and that it was necessary upon her part to do something more than merely make no alarm. The idea of singing occurred to her. It was a childish song that she had been taught, when a pretty child, that she now warbled forth a few lines of—
"If I were a forest bird,