etiring to her couch, though extinguishing her light, she sat
musing by the window of her chamber upon the thousand conflicting and
sad thoughts that were at strife in her spirit. She had not been long in
this position when the sound of approaching horsemen reached her ears,
and after a brief interval, during which she could perceive that they
had alighted, she heard the door of the hall gently unclosed, and
footsteps, set down with nice caution, moving through the passage. A
light danced for a moment fitfully along the chamber, as if borne from
the sleeping apartment of Munro to that adjoining the hall in which the
family were accustomed to pursue their domestic avocations. Then came an
occasional murmur of speech to her ears, and then silence.

Perplexed with these circumstances, and wondering at the return of Munro
at an hour something unusual--prompted too by a presentiment of
something wrong, and apprehensive on the score of Ralph's safety--a
curiosity not, surely, under these circumstances, discreditable, to know
what was going on, determined her to ascertain something more of the
character of the nocturnal visitation. She felt secured from the
strangeness of the occurrence, that evil was afoot, and solicitous for
its prevention, she was persuaded to the measure solely with the view to
good.

Hastily, but with trembling hands, undoing the door of her apartment,
she made her way into the long, dark gallery, with which she was
perfectly familiar, and soon gained the apartment already referred to.
The door fortunately stood nearly closed, and she successfully passed it
by and gained the hall, which immediately adjoined, and lay in perfect
darkness. Without herself being seen, she was enabled, through a crevice
in the partition dividing the two rooms, to survey its inmates, and to
hear distinctly everything that was uttered.

As she expected, there were the two conspirators, Rivers and Munro,
earnestly engaged in discourse; to which, as it concerns materially our
progress, we may well be permitted to lend our attention. They spoke on
a variety of topics entirely foreign to the understanding of the
half-affrighted and nervously-susceptible, but still resolute young girl
who heard them; and nothing but her deep anxieties for one, whose own
importance in her eyes at that moment she did not conjecture, could have
sustained her while listening to a dialogue full of atrocious intention,
and larded throughout with a famili