Presently he awoke from his drugged sleep to fresh pain, fresh fury, to ever more exacting demands and wilder accusations. The hours dragged on until about six o’clock, when a servant came and told her that Sir Simon Sykes had arrived, and was in the library with Mr. Brownrigg. She went towards the room slowly, saying to herself, as if it were not really clear in her own mind: ‘It is coming nearer now, much nearer. There are not many hours more. Six o’clock, seven, eight, nine; in three hours I shall be free.’ She lifted her eyes towards the open hall door; the sunshine streamed in. All without was light and bright and warm. That was freedom. She opened the library door and went into the room. CHAPTER XXIV. Very late that night Signor Oriole sat in the room which was called his study, quite alone. He slept less and less as he grew older, and he was left, as usual, with all the lower part of the house to himself in a dead silence. His books and papers and writing materials were all around him. His study was removed only by a narrow little anteroom from that of Minna--her sitting-room and studio combined. These three rooms were old, with low roofs, and beams across the ceilings; but the original windows, small and high up in the wall, had been removed, and French ones opening to the ground substituted for them. Of course the three windows all commanded the same view, of a woodland glade and a broad slope of grass like an avenue between thick walls of dark trees which sloped upwards, climbing a hill. It was a portion of the park belonging to Yewridge Hall--a part which the inhabitants of Minna’s house were free to wander in as much as they chose. After Minna and Rhoda had gone upstairs Signor Oriole went to his study. The lamp was lighted, but the window was still open, and he went to it, and stood there, looking out. The yellow lamplight was behind him. Before him was the dark solemnity of the glade and wood, but that, too, soon began to take a darkly silvery appearance. A strange light, at once deep and pale, began to palpitate in the sky. His eyes were riveted on the summit of the little hill, for the awakening, if one may so call it, in the sky seemed to proceed from there. Whiter and whiter it grew, clearer and clearer, till all nature seemed to wait breathlessly for the visitor whose advent was thus foretold. She came at last; the outline of the hill-top grew suddenly sharp and clear, then a crisp white spark glittered on it--spread, grew, dilated, enlarged into a gradually growing silver disc. All above, below, around, is glorified, regalized, resplendent, as the moon floats up with majesty into the clear dark spaces of the heavens. ‘Ah!’ said Signor Giuseppe to himself, as he watched the spectacle with the beginning of a smile, and with the matter-of-fact eyes of a child of the South, ‘it is a fine night.’