The piano stood on the left, passing down from the parlor door towards the rear of the room, and behind it was a small inlaid table covered with books, and a large easy chair designed for lazy reading. Any person in the chair would be within twelve inches of the glass doors and not over ten feet from the two men at the sofa in the little back room. Josephine distinctly heard, through the thin glass, the hum of their voices as she approached the table, but not many of the words were audible. Confound it!--she thought--her plan of sitting in the chair, pretending to read as a safeguard against possible detection, and overhearing by laying her head back against the door--this would never do. Time was pressing--finesse must give way to boldness; and in the sixteenth of a minute thereafter the sliding doors were softly parted by less than half an inch of space--too little to be readily noticed from the back room, which was the lighter of the two, and yet enough to see through if necessary, (but she did not intend to look,) and to _hear_ through, which was the matter of first consequence. And there she stood--an eaves-dropper of the first order--a flush of shame and of half-conscious guilt on cheek and brow, and a wild, startled look in her eyes, such as a hare might show when listening for the second bay of the hound--liable to be caught by some one entering the parlor from the hall, or by the Colonel taking a fancy to enter the room for any purpose--and yet chained there, with her ear within an inch of the opening, as if present happiness and eternal salvation had both depended upon her keeping that position! Could anything be more shameful?--anything more despicable? Was ever a heroine so placed, even by English romancers or French dramatists? And was not the long dissertation at the beginning of this chapter, to prove the applicability of the spy system to war time, an absolute necessity?