No answer was returned.  His friend stood mute and motionless, with his left hand grasping his gun, and his right thrust into the waist of his coat.  His eye grew upon the window, and his chest heaved, and his cheek paled and flushed alternately with the subdued emotion of his heart.  A human face was placed close to the unblemished glass, and every feature was distinctly revealed by the lamp that still lay upon the table.  The glaring eye was fixed on the taller of the officers; but though the expression was unfathomably guileful, there was nothing that denoted any thing like a recognition of the party.  The brightness of the wood fire had so far subsided as to throw the interior of the room into partial obscurity, and under the disguise of his hood it was impossible for one without to distinguish the features of the taller officer.  The younger, who was scarcely an object of attention, passed comparatively unnoticed.

Fatigued and dimmed with the long and eager tension of its nerves, the eye of the latter now began to fail him.  For a moment he closed it; and when again it fell upon the window; it encountered nothing but the clear and glittering pane.  For upwards of a minute he and his friend still continued to rivet their gaze, but the face was no longer visible.

Why is it that what is called the “human face divine” is sometimes gifted with a power to paralyse, that the most loathsome reptile in the creation cannot attain?  Had a hyena or cougar of the American forest, roaring for prey, appeared at that window, ready to burst the fragile barrier, and fasten its talons in their hearts, its presence would not have struck such sickness to the soul of our adventurers as did that human face.  It is that man, naturally fierce and inexorable, is alone the enemy of his own species.  The solution of this problem—­this glorious paradox in nature, we leave to profounder philosophers to resolve.  Sufficient for us be it to know, and to deplore that it is so.

Footsteps were now heard upon the stairs; and the officers, aroused to a full sense of their danger, hastily and silently prepared themselves for the encounter.

“Drop a bullet into your gun,” whispered the elder, setting the example himself.  “We may be obliged to have recourse to it at last.  Yet make no show of hostility unless circumstances satisfy us we are betrayed; then, indeed, all that remains for us will be to sell our lives as dearly as we can.  Hist! he is here.”

The door opened; and at the entrance, which was already filled up in the imaginations of the young men with a terrible and alarming figure, appeared one whose return had been anxiously and long desired.  It was a relief, indeed, to their gallant but excited hearts to behold another than the form they had expected; and although, for the moment, they knew not whether the Canadian came in hostility or in friendship, each quitted the attitude of caution into which he had thrown himself, and met him midway in his passage through the room.  There was nothing in the expression of his naturally open and good-humoured countenance to denote he was at all aware of the causes for alarm that had operated so powerfully on themselves.  He announced with a frank look and unfaltering voice every thing was in readiness for their departure.