“Hush!” replied, my father, as he turned his ear attentively in the direction whence the noise proceeded; “that is not the movement of a mob—they step too well together. Soldiers on march, for a hundred!” At the Colonel’s observation, my mother, who had nearly fainted, gradually recovered courage, and left the apartment for the nursery to re-establish mine,—my father remained at his post, to ascertain what the party were, who at this late hour approached his fortilage,—while Father Dominic ejaculating a pious “Heaven stand between us and evil!” turned down his tumbler to the bottom. Well, it was only his third one, after all.
CHAPTER II. THE PLOT THICKENS.
Now Christie’s Will peep’d from the tower,
And out at the shot-hole peeped he,
And, “Ever unlucky,” quo’ he, “is the hour,
When a woman comes to speer for me.”
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
In a short time “the heavy tread of marching men” ceased, as a party of ten or twelve soldiers halted immediately in front of my father’s barricade.