After ten o’clock had chimed, she began to find the hours pass slowly and painfully. Still, however, the child slept, and still she worked on. At length the deep tone of the church-clock bell gave forth the hour of one, and she became affrighted at Helen’s absence.
Her eyes ached painfully. She had worked many hours, and had continued to do so, if only to pass away the lone, long vigil she was keeping.
She had been weeping, too, for she was weak in body, and that created a depression of spirits which found relief only in tears. She was harrassed by strange fears and vague doubts. Why, why was Helen so long away? What could have happened?—some dreadful accident, perhaps—she thought of nothing but that; for what else would or could keep a young mother from her first-born in the very commencement of its babyhood. She grew sick at heart; for if her painful foreboding proved only true, what would be the result?
Hour after hour came and went; but though she listened to every footfall as it approached, and believed, until it went past the house, that it must be that of her late companion, she was disappointed in every instance. Helen came not.
Once or twice the little babe awoke and cried, but she knelt down by its side, laid her own soft, innocent cheek close to its little velvet face, and soothed its low, fretful sobbing again into slumber.
During the long night she was conscious of a strange tremulous motion in the room.
It was not that she shivered with the cold, or trembled from nervousness, but the sensation was that of vibration, as though heavy waggons were perpetually passing along the street, but making no sound.
Several times her attention was aroused by a loud clicking repeated at intervals. A peculiar, unusual sound it was, but she heeded it little. She reflected that in the many, many nights she had sat up to work, she had often heard unaccountable noises.
The blue dawn stole into the room through the window curtains, and paling the feeble ray of her solitary candle, found her wan and haggard, alone with the child. And now the little creature, needing nourishment, awoke, and cried piteously, and would not be pacified. Lotte was greatly distressed at first, and wept with the child, for she knew not what to do.
But she remembered that it did not become her in the position of trust in which she was placed to be faint of heart. It was necessary to be calm, composed, and collected, in order that she might deliberate upon the best course to pursue.