drooping as if whispering to each other close at hand, seemed to give a little air and outlet to the musing of her heart. But all at once Hetty gave a smothered cry, and clung to the nearest solid thing, feeling as if the ground was reeling away from under her feet. Over the grass, which was damp and sodden with winter dews, winding among the beds and ranks of chrysanthemums, what was that she saw? Something black in the moonlight, a moving figure, the sight of which made her heart stand still. Her eyes seemed to strain out of her head, her heart to jump into her throat in sudden panic and horror. A man! Hetty rushed to the door in the first impulse after her senses returned to her; but then she remembered the key turned in Miss Hofland’s door; and though she opened her own softly, she closed it again, and locked it too, in her terror. And then she returned to the window, drawn as by a spell, to watch that mysterious figure slowly moving round and round among the drooping winter flowers. [Illustration] CHAPTER XVI. ALARMS. “Have you a headache, my dear? I am sure you have a headache. You are looking quite ghostly. Poor little thing! you look as if you had not slept all night.” “Oh, it is nothing,” said Hetty. “I didn’t sleep very well, I got off my sleep somehow.” “I know; people talk about the sleep of youth, but I can remember many nights, when I was a girl like you, when I never closed my eyes. Take your tea, my dear, and it will refresh you. I suppose as you couldn’t sleep you got to thinking, and cried for your mother like a baby, and to go home.” “Oh, Miss Hofland!” cried Hetty. “Yes, I know very well how girls do who have got mothers to cry after. I used to envy them, not having one. Don’t cry now, but take your breakfast and cheer up a little. Have a little of this nice toast. When you cannot have what you want, you should try to get all the good you can out of what you have,” the governess said. This philosophy of her profession was dreary, and not suited to Hetty’s tremulous and unaccustomed ease. “Didn’t you sleep?” said Rhoda. “Oh, isn’t it awfully quiet in the night when one can’t sleep?” The child, who had thawed very much out of her first gravity, threw her arms round Hetty and kissed her; but while she gave her this embrace asked, with a nervous whisper in her ear, “Did you hear anything?--did you see anything?” with an anxious look. “I heard the stable clock, and the hours striking from the village,” said Hetty. “Oh! don’t say anything more. It was only that I couldn’t sleep.”