'If you please, Miss Margaret, he says he's to ask particular how

you are. I think he must mean missus; but he says his last words

were, to ask how Miss Hale was.' 'Me!' said Margaret, drawing herself up. 'I am quite well. Tell

him I am perfectly well.' But her complexion was as deadly white

as her handkerchief; and her head ached intensely.

Mr. Hale now came in. He had left his sleeping wife; and wanted,

as Margaret saw, to be amused and interested by something that

she was to tell him. With sweet patience did she bear her pain,

without a word of complaint; and rummaged up numberless small

subjects for conversation--all except the riot, and that she

never named once. It turned her sick to think of it.

'Good-night, Margaret. I have every chance of a good night

myself, and you are looking very pale with your watching. I shall

call Dixon if your mother needs anything. Do you go to bed and

sleep like a top; for I'm sure you need it, poor child!' 'Good-night, papa.' She let her colour go--the forced smile fade away--the eyes grow

dull with heavy pain. She released her strong will from its

laborious task. Till morning she might feel ill and weary.

She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so

much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers

of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that

she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed

and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept

their own miserable identity. She could not be alone, prostrate,

powerless as she was,--a cloud of faces looked up at her, giving

her no idea of fierce vivid anger, or of personal danger, but a

deep sense of shame that she should thus be the object of

universal regard--a sense of shame so acute that it seemed as if

she would fain have burrowed into the earth to hide herself, and

yet she could not escape out of that unwinking glare of many

eyes.




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