tform,
grasped the iron balustrade with one hand, and swung himself lightly to
the ground. The whistle screamed again like a disappointed fiend.

"Guess that young man was up late last night," remarked the conductor to
the brakeman; "a powerful sound sleep he was in, anyhow."

"Off on a spree to New York, most like," responded the brakeman,
tightening his dirty-brown tippet around his neck, "and thought better
of it at the last minute."

CHAPTER XXXIII.

TILL THE ELEVENTH HOUR.

Her fruitless call for Bressant seemed quite to exhaust Sophie. For a
long time afterward she hardly opened her mouth, except to swallow some
hot black coffee. The professor sat, for the most part, with his finger
on her pulse, his eyes looking more hollow and his forehead more deeply
lined than ever before, but with no other signs of anxiety or suffering.
Cornelia came in and out--a restless spirit. She awaited Sophie's
recovery with no less of dread than of hope. Her life hung, as it were,
upon her sister's. The moment in which Sophie recovered her faculties
enough to think and speak would be the last that Cornelia could maintain
her mask of honor and respectability, for Cornelia knew that Sophie was
in possession of her secret; she had been up in her room, and the open
window had told the story.

It was a time of awful suspense. Cornelia wished there had been somebody
there to talk with; even Bill Reynolds would have been welcome now. He,
however, had departed long ago, having bethought himself that his horse
was catching its death o' cold, standing out there with no rug on. She
was entirely alone; she hardly dared to think, for fear something guilty
should be generated in her mind; and, though every moment was pain,
without stop or mitigation, every moment was inestimably precious, too;
it was so much between her and revelation. She almost counted the
seconds as they passed, yet rated them for dragging on so wearily.
Every tick of the little ormolu clock marked away a large part of her
life, and yet was wearisome to so much of it as remained. Sometimes she
debated whether she could not anticipate the end by speaking out at
once, of her own free-will; but no, short as her time was, she could not
afford to lose the smallest fraction of it--no, she could not.

Bethinking herself that her father would be lost to her after the
revelation had taken place, Cornelia felt a consuming desire to enjoy
his love to the fullest possible ex