She rushed hurriedly again into the passage—­and, though apprehending momentarily that her knees would sink from under her, took her way up the narrow flight of steps leading into the second story, and to the youth’s chamber.  As she reached the door, a feminine scruple came over her.  A young girl seeking the apartment of a man at midnight—­she shrunk back with a new feeling.  But the dread necessity drove her on, and with cautious hand undoing the latch securing the door by thrusting her hand through an interstice between the logs—­wondering at the same time at the incautious manner in which, at such a period and place, the youth had provided for his sleeping hours—­she stood tremblingly within the chamber.

Wrapped in unconscious slumbers, Ralph Colleton lay dreaming upon his rude couch of a thousand strange influences and associations.  His roving fancies had gone to and fro, between his uncle and his bewitching cousin, until his heart grew softened and satisfied, not less with the native pleasures which they revived in his memory, than of the sweet oblivion which they brought of the many painful and perilous prospects with which he had more recently become familiar.  He had no thought of the present, and the pictures of the past were all rich and ravishing.  To his wandering sense at that moment there came a sweet vision of beauty and love—­of an affection warmly cherished—­green as the summer leaves—­fresh as its flowers—­flinging odors about his spirit, and re-awakening in its fullest extent the partially slumbering passion—­reviving many a hope, and provoking with many a delicious anticipation.  The form of the one, lovely beyond comparison, flitted before him, while her name, murmured with words of passion by his parted lips, carried with its utterance a sweet promise of a pure faith, and an unforgetting affection.  Never once, since the hour of his departure from home, had he, in his waking moments, permitted that name to find a place upon his lips, and now syllabled into sound by them in his unconscious dreams, it fell with a stunning influence upon an auditor, whose heart grew colder in due proportion with the unconscious but warm tenderness of epithet with which his tongue coupled its utterance.

The now completely unhappy Lucy stood sad and statue-like.  She heard enough to teach her the true character of her own feelings for one, whose articulated dreams had revealed the secret of his passion for another; and almost forgetting for a while the office upon which she had come, she continued to give ear to those sounds which brought to her heart only additional misery.