She stood drearily at the drawing-room window, looking forlornly out at the empty street.
The eerie twilight was falling, rain and wind rising and falling with it, the street lamps twinkling ghostily through the murky gloaming, the pavement black and shining. Belated pedestrians hurried along with bowed heads and uplifted umbrellas, the stages rattled past in a ceaseless stream, full to overflowing. The rainy night was settling down, the storm increasing as the darkness came on. Mollie surveyed all this disconsolately enough.
"I don't mind a ducking," she murmured, plaintively, "and I never take cold; but I don't want that man to see me looking like a drowned rat. Oh, if it should turn out to be Hugh—dear, dear Hugh!" Her face lighted rapturously at the thought. "I never knew how much I loved him until I lost him. If it isn't Hugh, and Hugh asks me to run away with him to-morrow, I'll do it—I declare I will—and the others may go to grass!"
At that moment, voices sounded on the stairs—the voices of Mrs. Walraven and her cousin.
The drawing-room door was ajar, Mollie's little figure hidden in the amber drapery of the window, and she could see them plainly, without herself being seen.
"You won't fail?" Mrs. Walraven said, impressively. "I will do my part. Are you equal to yours?"
"I never fail where I mean to succeed," answered Dr. Guy, with equal emphasis. "Sooner or later, I triumph! I shall triumph now! 'All things are possible to him who knows how to wait.' I have waited, and this night gives me my reward."
The house door closed after the young man. Mrs. Walraven peeped into the drawing-room, never seeing the slender figure amid the voluminous golden damask, and then reascended the stairs. Mollie was again in silence and solitude.
"Now, what are those two up to, I should like to know?" soliloquized the young lady. "Some piece of atrocious mischief, I'll be bound! He looks like the Miltonic Lucifer sometimes, that man, only not one half so good-looking; but there is a snakish, treacherous, cold-blooded glare in his greenish-black eyes that makes me think of the arch-tempter; and some people have the bad taste to call him handsome."
The twilight had ended in darkness by this time. Mollie put her hand to her belt to find her watch, but it was not there.