"No, Helen, not quite asleep, for he spoke to me. But I think he was very sleepy, for I hardly understood what he said; and as he appeared extremely tired when he went to bed, I told Curtis to darken the room again, and leave him quiet."
Another half-hour brought forth the Davenports and Mr. Vivian; but still Mr. Mowbray did not appear, and Helen, though hitherto she had been quite satisfied by her mother's account of his prolonged slumbers, again began to feel uneasy about him.
"Do you not think, mamma," said she, "that I might venture to go up to him?"
"I see not the least objection to it, Helen; especially as we know, that if it were you who happened to wake him out of the soundest sleep he ever enjoyed, the pleasure of seeing you near him would quite atone for it."
"Very well mamma,--then I shall certainly let him sleep no longer now;" and, so saying, Helen left the room.
"Is not Helen Mowbray a charming creature!" said a gentleman who was seated next Miss Torrington, and who, being neither young, handsome, rich, nor noble, felt that he could wound no feelings by expressing his admiration of one young lady to another.
"I will tell you what she is," answered Rosalind warmly: "she is just as much better than every body else in the world, as her sister, there, is more beautiful."
"And you are...." said the middle-aged gentleman, fixing a pair of very intelligent eyes on her face,--"you are...."
But notwithstanding the look of curiosity with which Miss Torrington listened, the speaker suddenly stopped, for a bell was rung with that sort of sudden and continued vehemence which denotes haste and agitation in the hand that gives it movement.
"That is my father's bell!" said Charles in an accent of alarm; and starting up, he was out of the room in an instant.
Mrs. Mowbray immediately followed him, and for several minutes a sort of heavy silence seemed to have fallen on every individual present--not a word being uttered by any one, and the eyes of all fixing themselves on the face of Fanny, who kept her place as if spell-bound, but with a countenance that expressed a feeling approaching to terror.
"This is not to be borne!" exclaimed Rosalind abruptly. "Excuse us for a moment," she added, addressing those who still remained in the breakfast-room.--"Come with me, Fanny, and let us know the worst at once."