“Now, Miss, are you ready?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and her heart beat for a moment as if it would suffocate her, and then was still; an icy chill stole over her, and as on tip-toe she followed Phœbe, she felt as if she glided without weight or contact, like a spirit.
Through a dark room they passed, very softly, first, a little light under the door showed that there were candles in the next. They halted and listened. Phœbe opened the door and entered.
Standing back in the shadow, Alice saw the room and the people in it, distinctly. The parson was not the sort of contraband clergyman she had fancied, by any means, but a thin hectic man of some four-and-thirty years, only looking a little dazed by brandy and water, and far gone in consumption. Handsome thin features, and a suit of seedy black, and a white choker, indicated that lost gentleman, who was crying silently as he smoked his pipe, I daresay a little bit tipsy, gazing into the fire, with his fatal brandy and water at his elbow.
“Eh! Mr. Vargers, smoking after all I said to you!” murmured Miss Phœbe severely, advancing toward her round-shouldered sweetheart, with her finger raised.
Mr. Vargers replied pleasantly; and as this tender “chaff” flew lightly between the interlocutors, the parson looked still into the fire, hearing nothing of their play and banter, but sunk deep in the hell of his sorrowful memory.
As Phœbe talked on, Vargers grew agreeable and tender, and in about three minutes after her own entrance, she saw with a thrill, imperfectly, just with the “corner of her eye,” something pass behind them swiftly toward the outer door. The crisis, then, had come. For a moment there seemed a sudden light before her eyes, and then a dark mist; in another she recovered herself.
Vargers stood up suddenly.
“Hullo! what's gone with the door there?” said he, sternly ending their banter.
If he had been looking on her with an eye of suspicion, he might have seen her colour change. But Phœbe was quick-witted and prompt, and saying, in hushed tones—