everything the sweet influence of it.  There was no snow on the lawn, which was a dry crisp of frost-killed grass, as flat as if swept by a broom, and here and there were the faintest patches and mottles of silver from this moon, aside from a broad gleam of the garish light from the street-lamp.  The bushes and trees showed lines of silver.  The moon was so young that the stars were quite brilliant.  Taking all the lights together—­the electric light in the street, the new moon, and the stars—­the lawn was quite visible, and even, because the leaves were now all gone from the trees, the road for quite a distance beyond.  Charlotte had a considerable vista in which to watch for her father.  The time passed incredibly in this watching.  She had upon her such a fear and even premonition that he might not come, that the minutes passed with the horrible swiftness that they pass for a criminal awaiting execution.  The first time she slipped out in the dining-room—­with a last look at the lawn and road, to be sure that he would not be there in the mean time—­to see what time it was by the clock on the shelf, she was amazed.  It was already eight o’clock.  She had not dreamed it was more than half-past seven.  She crept back to her place by the parlor window, with the feeling that much of her time of reprieve had passed, and that she was so much the nearer the certainty of tribulation.  Instead of impatience she had rather the desire to defer approaching disaster.  While she watched, she had less and less hope that her father would come on that train, and yet she kept her heart alive by picturing her rapture when she should see his tall, dark figure enter the lawn path, when she should run and unlock and unbar the door and throw her arms around his neck.  She made up her mind that she should not confess to him what a panic she had been in because of his non-arrival.  She planned how she would run and set the dinner, in which she still believed, on the table, and how hungry he would be for it.  She was quite sure that her poor father did not in these days provide himself with sumptuous lunches in the city.  But all the time she reared these air-castles, she saw for a certainty the dark sky of her trouble through them.  For some premonition, or a much modified form of prophecy, the rudimentary expression of a divine sense in reality exists.  It existed in Charlotte watching for her father at the window, and yet so bound up was she in the probabilities and present sequences of things that she still watched.  Now and then she made sure that she saw her father turn from the road into the lawn, but the figure, to her horror, would remain standing still in one place.  It was simply a slender spruce which had seemed to start out of a corner of the night with a semblance of life.  Now and then she actually did see a figure coming up the road, approaching the entrance to the lawn, and her heart leaped up with joy.  She watched for it to enter, but that was the end.  Whoever it was, it had passed the house and gone farther up the road.  Those were the cruellest moments of any—­the momentary revival of hope and then the dashing it to the ground.  By-and-by her eyes, strained with such watching, began to actually deceive her.  She saw, as she thought, shadows, approach and enter the house.  Several times she ran to the door and opened it, and no one was there.