Hastily, but with trembling hands, undoing the door of her apartment,
she made her way into the long, dark gallery, with which she was
perfectly familiar, and soon gained the apartment already referred to.
The door fortunately stood nearly closed, and she successfully passed it
by and gained the hall, which immediately adjoined, and lay in perfect
darkness. Without herself being seen, she was enabled, through a crevice
in the partition dividing the two rooms, to survey its inmates, and to
hear distinctly everything that was uttered.
As she expected, there were the two conspirators, Rivers and Munro,
earnestly engaged in discourse; to which, as it concerns materially our
progress, we may well be permitted to lend our attention. They spoke on
a variety of topics entirely foreign to the understanding of the
half-affrighted and nervously-susceptible, but still resolute young girl
who heard them; and nothing but her deep anxieties for one, whose own
importance in her eyes at that moment she did not conjecture, could have
sustained her while listening to a dialogue full of atrocious intention,
and larded throughout with a familiar and sometimes foul phraseology
that certainly was not altogether unseemly in such association.
Pages:
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447