sor
stood much at the window, and once or twice he imagined he caught a
glimpse, somewhere down the road, of a darkly-clad woman's figure; but
she never came nearer, and he decided it must be a hallucination of his
fading eyes.

Eleven o'clock struck from the little ormolu timepiece. A few moments
afterward Sophie stirred slightly as she lay, and the professor and
Cornelia listened breathlessly for what she would say.

She lifted her heavy lids, and turned her eyes, a little dimmer now than
heretofore, but steady and confident, first on her father, then on her
sister.

"Till noon--remember!" said she.

Nothing more was heard, after that, but the hasty ticking of the little
ormolu clock, as its hands traveled steadily around the circle.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE HOUR AND THE MAN.

Bressant jumped on to the platform of the newly-arrived train. The cars
were pretty full; but, coming at last to a vacant seat by the side of a
clean-shaven gentleman with a straight, hard mouth, and a glossy-brown
wig, curling smoothly inward all around the edge, he dropped into it
without ceremony.

The train left the depot and hurried away over the road which Bressant
had just traversed in the opposite direction. He sat with his arms
folded, appearing to take no notice of any thing, and his neighbor with
the wig read the latest edition of a New-York paper with stern
attention, occasionally altering the position of his stove-pipe hat on
his head. By-and-by, the conductor, a small, precise man, with a
dark-blue coat, cap to match, a neatly-trimmed sandy beard, shaved upper
lip, and an utterance as distinct and clippy as the holes his steel
punch made in the tickets, came along upon his rounds.

Bressant put his hands into his pockets, and discovered, with some
consternation, that he had but a comparatively small amount of money
left; his newly-accepted poverty was certainly losing no time in making
itself felt. However, such as it was, he handed it to the conductor, and
inquired how near it would take him to his proposed destination.

"Eighty-one miles, rail," responded the official, as he took and clipped
the ticket of the gentleman with the newspaper; "comes shorter by road,
seventy-four to seventy-five," and he proceeded down the aisle, snapping
up tickets on one side or the other, as a hen does grains of corn.

Bressant covered his eyes with his hand, and amused himself by
performing a little sum in mental arithmetic. The