"Can he be there?—in that room, of all the rooms in the house!"
Quickly as the thought arose in her mind, Sarah raised the letter (which she had hitherto carried in her hand) to the bosom of her dress, and hid it for the second time, exactly as she had hidden it on leaving her mistress's bedside.
She then stole across the nursery on tiptoe toward the inner room. The entrance to it, to please some caprice of the child's, had been arched, and framed with trellis-work, gayly colored, so as to resemble the entrance to a summer-house. Two pretty chintz curtains, hanging inside the trellis-work, formed the only barrier between the day-room and the bedroom. One of these was looped up, and toward the opening thus made Sarah now advanced, after cautiously leaving her candle in the passage outside.
The first object that attracted her attention in the child's bedroom was the figure of the nurse-maid, leaning back, fast asleep, in an easy-chair by the window. Venturing, after this discovery, to look more boldly into the room, she next saw her master sitting with his back toward her, by the side of the child's crib. Little Rosamond was awake, and was standing up in bed with her arms round her father's neck. One of her hands held over his shoulder the doll that she had taken to bed with her, the other was twined gently in his hair. The child had been crying bitterly, and had now exhausted herself, so that she was only moaning a little from time to time, with her head laid wearily on her father's bosom.
The tears stood thick in Sarah's eyes as they looked on her master and on the little hands that lay round his neck. She lingered by the raised curtain, heedless of the risk she ran, from moment to moment, of being discovered and questioned—lingered until she heard Captain Treverton say soothingly to the child:
"Hush, Rosie, dear! hush, my own love! Don't cry any more for poor mamma. Think of poor papa, and try to comfort him."
Simple as the words were, quietly and tenderly as they were spoken, they seemed instantly to deprive Sarah Leeson of all power of self-control. Reckless whether she was heard or not, she turned and ran into the passage as if she had been flying for her life. Passing the candle she had left there, without so much as a look at it, she made for the stairs, and descended them with headlong rapidity to the kitchen-floor. There one of the servants who had been sitting up met her, and, with a face of astonishment and alarm, asked what was the matter.
"I'm ill—I'm faint—I want air," she answered, speaking thickly and confusedly. "Open the garden door, and let me out."
The man obeyed, but doubtfully, as if he thought her unfit to be trusted by herself.
"She gets stranger than ever in her ways," he said, when he rejoined his fellow-servant, after Sarah had hurried past him into the open air. "Now our mistress is dead, she will have to find another place, I suppose. I, for one, sha'n't break my heart when she's gone. Shall you?"