At last, Margaret Cooper found herself alone and in her chamber. With unusual vigilance she locked and doublelocked the door. She then flung herself upon the bed. Her face was buried in the clothes. A convulsion of feeling shook her frame. But her eyes remained dry, and her cheeks were burning. She rose at length and began to undress, but for this she found herself unequal. She entered the couch and sat up in it--her hands crossed upon her lap--her face wan, wild, the very picture of hopelessness if not desperation! The words of her weak mother had tortured her; but what was this agony to that which was occasioned by her own thoughts. “Oh God!” she exclaimed at length, “can it be real? Can it be true? Do I wake? Is it no dream? Am I, am I what I dare not name to myself--and dread to hear from any other? Alas! it is true--too true. That shade, that wood!--oh, Alfred Stevens! Alfred Stevens! What have you done! To what have you beguiled me!” CHAPTER XXVIII STRENGTH AFTER FALL. That weary night no sleep came to the eyelids of the hapless Margaret Cooper. The garrulous language of the mother had awakened far other emotions in her bosom than those which she labored to inspire; and the warning of Mr. Calvert, for the first time impressed upon herself the terrible conviction that she was lost. In the wild intoxicating pleasures of that new strange dream, she had been wofully unconscious of the truth. So gradual had been the progress of passion, that it had never alarmed or startled her. Besides, it had come to her under a disguise afforded by the customary cravings of her soul. Her vanity had been the medium by which her affections had been won, by which her confidence had been beguiled, by which the guardian watchers of her virtue had been laid to sleep.