"Oh, Adam, you don't know. They are lynx-eyed and crafty men."
"No doubt. I am all safe, Karl."
Karl had been there longer than usual, and he rose to say good night. Mrs. Grey--for convenience sake we must continue to call her by that name, and Lucy Lady Andinnian--folded up her work and went downstairs with him. She was changed too; but for the better. The very pretty, blooming-faced Rose Turner had come in for her share of the world's bitter trouble, and it had spiritualized her. The once round face was oval now, the lovely features were refined, the damask cheeks were a shade more delicate, the soft blue eyes had a sad light in them. Miss Blake's words were not misapplied to her--"beautiful as an angel."
"Karl," she whispered, "the dread of discovery is wearing me out. If we could but get away from England!"
"I am sure it will wear out me," was Karl's answer.
"Adam is afraid of Mr. Smith, I am sure. He thinks Smith would stop his going. Karl, I fully believe, as truly as I ever believed any great truth in my life, that Mr. Smith is keeping us here and will not let us go. Mr. Smith may appear to be a friend outwardly, but I fear he is an inward enemy. Oh, dear! it is altogether a dreadful situation."
Karl went on home, his brain active, his heart sinking. The manner in which his wife had taken up the matter, distressed him greatly. He supposed she was resenting it chiefly on the score of her father and mother. The colonel had told him that they would rather have followed Lucy to the grave than see her his wife had Sir Adam lived.
"I wonder how she discovered it?" ran his thoughts--but in truth the fact did not excite so much speculation in his mind, because he was hourly living in the apprehension that people must suspect it. When we hold a dangerous secret, this is sure to be the case. "Perhaps Hewitt let drop an incautious word," he went on musing, "and Lucy caught it up, and guessed the rest. Or--perhaps I dropped one in my sleep."
Crossing the lawn of the Court, he entered by the little smoking-room, his hand pressed upon his aching brow. No wonder that people found fault with the looks of Sir Karl Andinnian! He was wearing to a skeleton. Just as his mother, when she was dying, used to see the
recapture of Adam in her dreams, so did Karl see it in his. Night after night would he wake up from one of the dreadful visions. Adam, the retaken convict, held fast by a heap of scowling, threatening warders, and a frightful scaffold conspicuous in the distance. He would start up in bed in horror, believing it all real, his heart quivering, and once or twice he knew that he had cried out aloud.
"Yes, yes, that's how it must have been," he said, the mystery becoming apparently clear to his eyes as the light of day. "Hewitt is too cautious and true. I have betrayed it in my sleep. Oh, my brother! May Heaven help and save him!"