could, though,
provisionally.

One o'clock by his watch on the dressing-table under the candle. St.
Sennans must have struck unheard. No wonder--in this wind! Surely it
had rather increased, if anything. Fenwick paced with noiseless care
about the little room; he could not be still. The sustained monotone
of wind and sea was only crossed now and then by a sound of fall or
breakage, to chronicle some little piece of mischief achieved by the
former on land, and raise the latter's hopes of some such success in
its turn before the night should end....

Two o'clock by the dressing-table watch, and still the noiseless
slippered feet of the sleepless man came and went. Little fear of any
one else hearing him! For the wind seemed to have got up the bit that
was predicted of it, and had certainly gone round to the suth'ard. If
any sleeper could cling to unconsciousness through the rattle of the
windows and the intermittent banging of a spectral door that defied
identification--the door that always bangs in storms everywhere--the
mere movement of a cautious foot would have no effect. If unable to
sleep for the wind, none would be alive to it. It would be lost in
the storm....

Three o'clock! Did you, who read this, ever watch through a night
with something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the
morning--a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting the _debut_ of
a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, so watching,
feel--not the tedium--but the maddening speed of the hours, the
cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful
reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you and _your_
lion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was still
a respite from _his_? Fenwick was; keenly conscious. And when on
a sudden he heard with a start that a furtive hand was on the
old-fashioned door-latch, he, knowing it could be none other than
Rosalind, sleepless in the storm, felt that the lion had stolen a
march on him, and that he must make up his mind sharp whether he would
go for complete confidence or partial reserve. Certainly the latter,
of necessity, said Alacrity. There could be no doubt of it, on her
account--for the present, at any rate.

For he had recollected, look you, that at the time of that stone-throw
into the rapids above Niagara he was a married man somehow separated
from his wife. And the way that he knew this was that he could
remember plainly that