Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/56

 a warm bed at three o'clock of a winter's night to gaze at a full moon from a hay loft if a question of the heavenly bodies had not summoned her. Do you think for a moment, sir, that I am here without a reason? Or rank somnambulism you may consider it?"

You would have laughed at the amount of indignant heat, as though I were hurt most tenderly, that I contrived to instil into my accents.

"Oh dear no, dear Lady Barbara!" says the horrid creature as silkily as possible; "that you are here without a reason I do not for a moment think. You misjudge me there, dear lady."

Captain Grantley was become the devil! I fairly raked his smiling face with the fierceness of my eyes, but when they were driven from it by the simplicity of his look, it was smiling still, yet inscrutable as the night in which we stood. His language was so ordered that it might mean everything; on the contrary it might mean nothing. This was the distracting part. The man spoke in such an honest, unpremeditated fashion that who should suspect that he knew anything at all? But why was he here? And why could at least two interpretations be put upon every word he uttered? These the ruminations of a guilty mind!

Hereabouts an idea regaled me. If I could but coax the Captain up into the loft, it would leave the ladder free. The prisoner then might make a dash for liberty, and if he had an athlete's body and sound wind and limbs to serve him in his