saw how to turn my weakness
into account. I made a false step on my way to the door; when I reached
it I leant heavily against the jam, and I said with a slur that I felt
unwell. I had certainly been flushed with wine when I left Rattray; it
would be no bad thing for him to hear that I had arrived quite tipsy at
the cottage; should he discover I had been near an hour on the way, here
was my explanation cut and dried.

So I shammed a degree of intoxication with apparent success, and Jane
Braithwaite gave me her arm up the stairs. My God, how strong it was,
and how weak was mine!

Left to myself, I reeled about my bedroom, pretending to undress; then
out with my candles, and into bed in all my clothes, until the cottage
should be quiet. Yes, I must lie still and feign sleep, with every nerve
and fibre leaping within me, lest the she-devil below should suspect
me of suspicions! It was with her I had to cope for the next
four-and-twenty hours; and she filled me with a greater present terror
than all those villains at the hall; for had not their poor little
helpless captive described her as "about the worst of the gang?"

To think that my love lay helpless there in the hands of those wretches;
and to think that her lover lay helpless here in the supervision of this
vile virago!

It must have been one or two in the morning when I stole to my
sitting-room window, opened it, and sat down to think steadily, with the
counterpane about my shoulders.

The moon sailed high and almost full above the clouds; these were
dispersing as the night wore on, and such as remained were of a
beautiful soft tint between white and gray. The sky was too light for
stars, and beneath it the open country stretched so clear and far that
it was as though one looked out at noonday through slate-colored glass.
Down the dewy slope below my window a few calves fed with toothless
mouthings; the beck was very audible, the oak-trees less so; but for
these peaceful sounds the stillness and the solitude were equally
intense.

I may have sat there like a mouse for half an hour. The reason was that
I had become mercifully engrossed in one of the subsidiary problems:
whether it would be better to drop from the window or to trust to the
creaking stairs. Would the creaking be much worse than the thud, and
the difference worth the risk of a sprained ankle? Well worth it, I at
length decided; the risk was nothing; my window was scarce a dozen feet
from the gro