where but there! Any time but now! Let his foe follow him, and
find him for himself, but not through me! There is enough upon my head
without.'

The fire ceased to be reflected in her jet black hair, uplifted face,
and eager eyes; her hand was gone from Harriet's arm; and the place
where she had been was empty.

CHAPTER 54. The Fugitives

Tea-time, an hour short of midnight; the place, a French apartment,
comprising some half-dozen rooms;--a dull cold hall or corridor, a
dining-room, a drawing-room, a bed-room, and an inner drawingroom, or
boudoir, smaller and more retired than the rest. All these shut in by
one large pair of doors on the main staircase, but each room provided
with two or three pairs of doors of its own, establishing several means
of communication with the remaining portion of the apartment, or with
certain small passages within the wall, leading, as is not unusual in
such houses, to some back stairs with an obscure outlet below. The whole
situated on the first floor of so large an Hotel, that it did not absorb
one entire row of windows upon one side of the square court-yard in the
centre, upon which the whole four sides of the mansion looked.

An air of splendour, sufficiently faded to be melancholy, and
sufficiently dazzling to clog and embarrass the details of life with a
show of state, reigned in these rooms The walls and ceilings were gilded
and painted; the floors were waxed and polished; crimson drapery hung
in festoons from window, door, and mirror; and candelabra, gnarled and
intertwisted like the branches of trees, or horns of animals, stuck
out from the panels of the wall. But in the day-time, when the
lattice-blinds (now closely shut) were opened, and the light let in,
traces were discernible among this finery, of wear and tear and dust,
of sun and damp and smoke, and lengthened intervals of want of use and
habitation, when such shows and toys of life seem sensitive like life,
and waste as men shut up in prison do. Even night, and clusters of
burning candles, could not wholly efface them, though the general
glitter threw them in the shade.

The glitter of bright tapers, and their reflection in looking-glasses,
scraps of gilding and gay colours, were confined, on this night, to one
room--that smaller room within the rest, just now enumerated. Seen from
the hall, where a lamp was feebly burning, through the dark perspective
of open doors, it looked as shining and precious as a gem.