Hour followed hour; the candles burned down; the fire wasted to white ashes; the wintry wind moaned without, carrying sleet on its wings. Still the girl's strength held out; she wrote with energy the dark record which was to ruin the murderer of St. Udo Brand. Long past midnight found her at the last page, and at the last sentence: "Little Ducie proves so much to my taste that I will go down to Surrey, and drop that hatch." The hoarse baying of the dogs roused her to things present. She rose from her cramped position, cold and trembling with terror. Who was lurking about so late? Her enemy? The candles dropped into their little wells of boiling wax and expired. She stood in the pitchy darkness, listening. The angry babel of howling dogs filled her ears again. A sudden pause; they, too, were listening. Then a yelp of canine rage and eagerness. Margaret groped in the box for another candle and a match; fitted the candle into the tall silver candlestick, lit it, and gathered up her papers, while the flame was as yet small and sickly as a far-off star. She hid them all in a compartment of her desk, carried the desk to a closet, locked it, and hid the key beneath a loose edge of the carpet. "I may pay the forfeit of my life for these proofs," she thought; "but Davenport and Gay shall see them, whatever the risk, and my work shall descend to their hands if I am removed." She was calm, but a curious pulse was beating in her ears and deadening her sense of hearing. Through it she could swear that strange noises were in the air, which were entirely foreign to any that could be caused within the house. The bounding pulse still beat in her ears, and she stood intently waiting. What it was she knew not, which smote her whole being into intensity--her hair bristled. There it was again--through the thick shutter and massive window--the deep breathing of a man who has been hard at work, and stops his operations to listen. Could it be that her enemy was at the window? Margaret shrank back; she had been standing in profile, not two feet from the window, and her ear had caught the indistinct sounds so clearly that she was able to trace them immediately to their cause. A man was in the balcony outside her window, and he was listening to know whether she was sleeping or waking. Perhaps a burglar? No. Mortlake was there to retrace his false step before the morning light should place his secret in other hands. "He's going to force an entrance and murder me," thought Margaret, who could reason distinctly in this moment of peril; "and, knowing that I only share the knowledge of his guilt, he hopes to escape suspicion. He will arrange it like a burglary--likely take away my few jewels and articles of value, and drop them in the mere. I am afraid I am lost."