Rosalind had resisted the impulse to do so for many an evening. She had paused by stealth in the dark window above in the corridor, and blushed for herself and fled from that spy’s place. But by force of trouble and doubt and anguish her scruples had been overcome, and now she had accepted for herself this position of spy. If her fears had been verified, and she had seen her mother cross that vacant space and steal into the house, what the better would she have been? But there is in suspicion a wild curiosity, an eagerness for certainty, which grows like a fever. She had come to feel that she must know--whatever happened she must be satisfied--come what would, that would be better than the gnawing of this suspense. And she had another object too. Her father was an invalid, exacting and fretful. If his wife was not ready at his call whenever he wanted her, his displeasure was unbounded; and of late it had happened many times that his wife had not been at his call. The scenes that had followed, the reproaches, the insults even, to which the woman whom she called mother had been subjected, had made Rosalind’s heart sick. If she could but see her, hasten her return, venture to call her, to bid her come quick, quick! it would be something. The girl was not philosopher enough to say to herself that Madam would not come a moment the sooner for being thus watched for. It takes a great deal of philosophy to convince an anxious woman of this in any circumstances, and Rosalind was in the pangs of a first trouble, the earliest anguish she had ever known. After she had driven Russell away, she stood with her face pressed against the glass and all her senses gone into her eyes and ears. She heard, she thought, the twitter of the twigs in the wind, the sharp sound now and then of one which broke and fell, which was like a footstep on the path; besides the louder sweep of the tree-tops in the wind, and on the other hand the muffled and faint sound of life from the dining-room, every variation in which kept her in alarm.