face leaning on her hand. There was a kind of film or flicker on her face, which at first he took to be the fitful firelight; but, on a second look, he saw that she was weeping. A sad and solitary spectacle, as shown him by the rising and the falling of the fire.
It was a little window of but four pieces of glass, and was not curtained; he chose it because the larger window near it was. It showed him the room, and the bills upon the wall respecting the drowned people starting out and receding by turns. But he glanced slightly at them, though he looked long and steadily at her. A deep rich piece of colour, with the brown flush of her cheek and the shining lustre of her hair, though sad and solitary, weeping by the rising and the falling of the fire.
She started up. He had been so very still that he felt sure it was not he who had disturbed her, so merely withdrew from the window and stood near it in the shadow of the wall. She opened the door, and said in an alarmed tone, “Father, was that you calling me?” And again, “Father!” And once again, after listening, “Father! I thought I heard you call me twice before!”
No response. As she reentered at the door, he dropped over the bank and made his way back, among the ooze and near the hiding-place, to Mortimer Lightwood: to whom he told what he had seen of the girl, and how this was becoming very grim indeed.
“If the real man feels as guilty as I do,” said Eugene, “he is remarkably uncomfortable.”
“Influence of secrecy,” suggested Lightwood.
“I am not at all obliged to it for making me Guy Fawkes in the vault and a Sneak in the area both at once,” said Eugene. “Give me some more of that stuff.”