The fire had been burning clearly; the sticks across the andirons had gradually become each an entire glowing coal, of a live vermilion tint, and half translucent, yet still retaining the shape of the hickory logs they had once been; here and there an elusive amethystine flame flickered, but the salient red and white blaze of the earlier stages was quenched, and the room was all in a dusky red shadow save for now and then a livid purple gleam. Isabel nodded as she sat on the inverted noggin; sleep seemed with her in some sort an ailment, since it so reduced her from her normal state of conversation. It was as if a palsy had fallen upon her faculties, and her face, bereft of its wonted animation, was unfamiliar, and pathetic, and forlornly reflective. The dog of the “frequent visitor” took note even in his slumbers of the dwindling state of the fire, and, with a countenance much solemnized by sleep and preternaturally sober, came and stood before it for a time, steadfastly regarding it. Then with a loud yawn, intrusive in the silence, he stretched his elastic length, rasping his nails on the stones of the hearth, and lay down once more before it. A cock crew, a muffled alarum in the distance; no other sound from the frosty midnight without. The example of the old hound had caused Mrs. Strobe to yawn too, with that epidemic appreciation of fatigue which the demonstration usually produces. She was not sorry for this, despite her ample repositories of what she collectively termed “manners.” She was in hopes Rathburn would note it, and draw the natural inference. “He ’lowed he wouldn’t bide all night, so he mought jes’ ez well take the hint an’ stir his stumps away from hyar. I never see sech a ow-_el_ ez the man,” she thought. But Glaston and Colbury hours were later than those kept in the mountains, and although Rathburn was aware that his stay exceeded the customary limits, he had no idea of its unprecedented extent. He went on after a momentary pause:— “He is a very dangerous customer. The eye of the law couldn’t be better employed than fixed on that man. In Glaston, or Colbury, or anywhere else, they’d be awfully pleased to get up any kind of a charge against such a domineering blusterer as that, which would lock him up somewhere, safe out of harm’s way.”