"Yes, ma'am, I is sure he is here. Dat am de fact. Jis sich man, stout, red face, black hair, and such eyes. I is sure he is a wicked man."
"But, Phebe, you describe his looks just as I saw them to-day. Have you seen him?"
"Oh, yes, ma'am--thought I wouldn't tell you though--but it come out when I didn't know him."
"Where? Has he been here? Has he tracked me home?"
"Why, you see, ma'am, when I goes to the door to let Agnes Brentnall out, I sees him over the way, by de lamp, and when she goes down the street, he walks after her, and dat am last I see of him dis night."
"Poor girl, then she is lost. If ever he fixes his basalisk eye upon her beauty, how can she escape. Poor girl--God protect thee--man will not."
There was a sobbing that told of tears--tears that told of a kind heart, crushed by a cold and careless world.
Then I was about to enter, but something said, "not yet," and I stepped down into the shadow by the high steps, till the footfall I heard upon the pavement should go by.
It did not pass--it came directly up to the door, familiar as a burglar with its night latch key. Why had they not bolted the door? It opened as though to one who had a right to enter. The intruder--it was the dark-visaged man I had seen five minutes before--closed the door gently after him without latching it.
There was a thin lace curtain before the window, through which, as I looked in between the slats of the blind, I could see him as he approached the bed. Phebe had left the light and gone into the back room. The lady had buried her face in the pillows--nothing but her raven locks, hanging loose in her neck, were visible. The villain looked at her for a moment, then, satisfied that she was asleep, he reached over her, and lifted a beautiful little girl from her side.
The light shone in her face--the mother started at the appealing cry for help--sprang up--Heavens, what do we see? It is little Sissee--Little Katy's sister and her mother!
What a sight for that mother! The man she so much dreaded--the man who had so disturbed her dreams--with her child, her last, her only child, in his strong arms, and no one near to protect, to save.
She sprang towards him, and fixed her feeble hands in his hair. Of what avail? He flung her from him reeling, fainting, across the room. The noise brought the faithful Phebe from her couch--too late. The mother saw her child disappearing in the dark passage--she heard her screams for help--she heard no more. One look of his terrible eye, as he bore away her struggling child, was enough to kill one of a stronger form than hers. One look of satisfied revenge--revenge of a man upon a feeble woman, and his hand is upon the door. One step more and he is in the street. One step more and he fell, beneath a blow of a stout cane in a strong man's hand, and lay trembling across that threshold, quivering like a bullock felled by the butcher's blow.