“Be calm, Marcia.  We will go to the upper chambers, shut the doors, and open the windows for fresh air.  It’s only for one night.  We can’t go away, you know; and we can’t get the fellow away, of course.”

“I wish I had died when I was sick.  This disgrace, this infamy, this shocking barbarity, is worse than death.  What are we to do? and where are we to go?  Ruin is a light thing to talk about, I have read of ruin in the papers, until it has become a matter of course;—­I begin to know what it means.”

It was a changeful, terrible beauty that beamed on her face.  She looked like an inspired priestess before the altar,—­then like Norma in her despair,—­then like the maddened Medea in Rachel’s thrilling impersonation.  Then disgust and fright overcame her, and her sensitive womanly nature bore sway.  It was more than she could bear, this accumulation of misfortune, disgrace, and insult.  Her soul rebelled, contended desperately with fate, till, overcome, she sank into her chair, and suffered herself to be led to her room.

Shut up in their retreat, the women waited for the morning with sleepless eyes, or with only transient lapses of consciousness.  Sometime after midnight, they were startled by the sound of a body falling heavily in the hall, and, an instant after, by the shout of “Burglars! thieves!” They rushed to the staircase in extreme fright, and soon learned the cause.  The wary officer evidently did not believe the tale that had been told him respecting the absence of Mr. Sandford; and, that nobody should go out or in without his knowledge, he had drawn the sofa across the hall, completely cutting off all passage.  A small jet of gas was left burning.  Charles, returning late from the club in a mild stage of inebriation, entered the house by means of his latch-key, not without difficulty, and at once fell headlong over the sofa, and the worthy official sleeping thereon.  When he heard the cry of “Burglars!” it occurred to him that he must have been knocked down by one of the gang; and he joined his own voice to the uproar,—­

“BuggLARS! buggLARS!”

An instant after, there was a grip on his collar.

“Now I got ye, ye vill’in!  What ye doin’ on here?”

“What you doin’ on, you rasc’l, inagen’l’m’n’shouse thistim’o’night?”

“Arnswer me, you scoundrel, breakin’ into a peaceful dwellin’!”

“Tha’swhat_I_wan’to know.—­How’d youcom’ere?  What’syerbusiness?  Le’gomycollar.  I’lsen’forp’lice.  Le’go!”

Tipsy as he was, he managed to give his assailant a pretty substantial token of regard under the ear, with his knuckles.

“Now young’un, you’re drunk!  I won’t hit you back, ’cause a case for manslaughter might be expensive.  How’d you break in here, when you are so drunk you can’t stand?  I don’t see how you could get in with the door open.”

“Noneo’yerimp’r’ence!  Cl’out!  Adecen’bugglar’sbad’nough; yousmokerot’nt’baccah.  G’off! youdirtybugg_lar!_”