"No, she went alone."
"Betrayed and abandoned, no doubt," said Queenie, bitterly.
"Something like that, certainly," answered the housekeeper, carelessly, and with that she turned over and went to sleep again, leaving Queenie to her own reflections.
They were not pleasant ones, certainly. The room was chilly, and she took up a shawl, wrapped it about her shoulders, and went back to her lonely vigil, pressing her forehead against the pane while she looked out into the cold winter night.
"Oh, to be out there in the night, and the cold, and the darkness," she murmured. "Oh, to feel the breath of freedom on my brow once more, and hope within my heart!
"How lonely, how dreary everything seems," she went on. "How dark and dreary the river looks except where the bars of moonlight touch it with brightness; how ghostly and skeleton-like the trees appear, tossing their naked arms in the breeze; how weird and melancholy the silent, deserted earth looks at midnight!"
Suddenly she started and uttered a low cry.
She fancied that she had seen a dark form darting cautiously about the garden beneath the windows.
She looked out again, and for a moment she thought herself mistaken, but directly the dark form of a man appeared from behind a tree, and skirting a strip of moonlight with cautious footsteps, disappeared in the shadows.
"What can that man be after?" she thought. "It is not Leon Vinton. Whom, then, can it be? Perhaps a burglar."