“Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master,” she softly whispers, “I must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness watching and waiting and dragging through the time.  Let me draw the curtains, and light the candles, and make things more comfortable about you.  The church-clocks will strike the hours just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass away just the same.  My Lady will come back, just the same.”

“I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak—­and he has been so long gone.”

“Not so very long, Sir Leicester.  Not twenty-four hours yet.”

“But that is a long time.  Oh, it is a long time!”

He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.

She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her.  Therefore she sits in the darkness for a while without a word, then gently begins to move about, now stirring the fire, now standing at the dark window looking out.  Finally he tells her, with recovered self-command, “As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for being confessed.  It is getting late, and they are not come.  Light the room!” When it is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only left to him to listen.

But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms and being sure that everything is ready to receive her.  Poor pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up hope within him.

Midnight comes, and with it the same blank.  The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement.  Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness.  If any distant sound be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is heavier than before.

The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester’s room.  As the night lags tardily on—­or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o’clock—­they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he cannot see it.  Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.