r what, she scarcely knew herself, but with an undefinable impression
that she must hear it--that (Jesuitically, and of course most horrible
doctrine!) the end might justify the otherwise indefensible means--and
that--that--in short, that she was going to do it, and this settled the
matter as well as finished up the reason!

The piano stood on the left, passing down from the parlor door towards
the rear of the room, and behind it was a small inlaid table covered
with books, and a large easy chair designed for lazy reading. Any person
in the chair would be within twelve inches of the glass doors and not
over ten feet from the two men at the sofa in the little back room.
Josephine distinctly heard, through the thin glass, the hum of their
voices as she approached the table, but not many of the words were
audible. Confound it!--she thought--her plan of sitting in the chair,
pretending to read as a safeguard against possible detection, and
overhearing by laying her head back against the door--this would never
do. Time was pressing--finesse must give way to boldness; and in the
sixteenth of a minute thereafter the sliding doors were softly parted by
less than half an inch of space--too little to be readily noticed from
the back room, which was the lighter of the two, and yet enough to see
through if necessary, (but she did not intend to look,) and to _hear_
through, which was the matter of first consequence. And there she
stood--an eaves-dropper of the first order--a flush of shame and of
half-conscious guilt on cheek and brow, and a wild, startled look in her
eyes, such as a hare might show when listening for the second bay of the
hound--liable to be caught by some one entering the parlor from the
hall, or by the Colonel taking a fancy to enter the room for any
purpose--and yet chained there, with her ear within an inch of the
opening, as if present happiness and eternal salvation had both depended
upon her keeping that position!

Could anything be more shameful?--anything more despicable? Was ever a
heroine so placed, even by English romancers or French dramatists? And
was not the long dissertation at the beginning of this chapter, to prove
the applicability of the spy system to war time, an absolute necessity?

What might have passed precedently, while she was looking after the
chicken and the bread-and-butter, Josephine had no means of divining. At
the time of her assuming her post of observation, Richard Crawford was