d him he loitered
by me for a little in a curious way, as if he wanted to say
something else; but I was too full of my own thoughts and cares to
pay much attention to him.

The next day, and the next, brought no change in my darling, and I
was growing every hour more anxious. I could see that Mr. Hale was
puzzled and uneasy, though he said he saw no reason for telegraphing
to Manchester, yet awhile. He was very attentive, and was reputed to
be very clever; and I knew that he was really attached to Milly,
whom he had attended from her infancy.

Angus Egerton saw me twice every day; and these brief interviews had
now become very painful to me. I found it so difficult to cheer him
with hopeful words, when my own heart was hourly growing heavier,
and the fears that had been vague and shadowy were gathering
strength and shape. I was very tired, but I held out resolutely; and
I had never once slept for so much as a quarter of an hour upon my
watch, until the second night after that meeting with Mrs. Darrell
at the door of the dressing-room.

That night I was seized with an unconquerable sleepiness, about an
hour after I had dismissed Susan Dodd. The room was very quiet, not
a sound except the ticking of the pretty little clock upon the
mantelpiece. Milly was fast asleep, and I was sitting on a low chair
by the fire trying to read, when my drowsiness overcame me, my heavy
eyelids fell, and I went off into a feverish kind of slumber, in
which I was troubled with an uneasy consciousness that I ought to be
awake.

I had slept in this way for a little more than an hour, when I
suddenly started up broad awake. [In] the intense quiet of the room
I had heard a sound like the chinking of glass, and I fancied that
Milly had stirred.

There was a table near her bed, with a glass of cooling drink and a
bottle of water upon it. I thought she must have stretched out her
hand for this glass, and that in so doing she had pushed the glass
against the bottle; but to my surprise I found her lying quite
still, and fast asleep. The sound must have come from some other
direction--from the dressing-room, perhaps.

I went into the dressing-room. There was no one there. No trace of
the smallest disturbance among the things. The medicine-bottles and
the medicine-glass stood on the little table exactly as I had left
them. I was very careful and precise in my arrangement of these
things, and it would have been difficult for the slightest
inter