She had stood in the hall within a few yards of Dorothy, and had intently watched her face all the time Richard was before the marquis.  But not because she watched the field of their play was Amanda able to read the heart whence ascended those strangely alternating lights and shadows.  She had, by her own confession, conceived a strong dislike to Dorothy the moment she saw her, and without love there can be no understanding.  Hate will sharpen observation to the point of microscopic vision, affording opportunity for many a shrewd guess, and revealing facts for the construction of the cleverest and falsest theories, but will leave the observer as blind as any bat to the scope of the whole, or the meaning of the parts which can be understood only from the whole; for love alone can interpret.

As she gazed on the signs of conflicting emotion in Dorothy’s changes of colour and expression, Amanda came quickly enough to the conclusion that nothing would account for them but the assumption that the sly puritanical minx was in love with the handsome young roundhead.  How else could the deathly pallor of her countenance while she fixed her eyes wide and unmoving upon his face, and the flush that ever and anon swept its red shadow over the pallor as she cast them on the ground at some brave word from the lips of the canting psalm-singer, be in the least intelligible?  Then came the difficulty:  how in that case was her share in his capture to be explained?  But here Amanda felt herself in her own province, and before the marquis rose, had constructed a very clever theory, in which exercise of ingenuity, however, unluckily for its truth, she had taken for granted that Dorothy’s nature corresponded to her own, and reasoned freely from the character of the one to the conduct of the other.  This was her theory:  Dorothy had expected Richard, and contrived his admission.  His presence betrayed by the mastiff, and his departure challenged by the warder, she had flown instantly to the alarm-bell, to screen herself in any case, and to secure the chance, if he should be taken, of liberating him without suspicion under cover of the credit of his capture.  The theory was a bold one, but then it accounted for all the points—­amongst the rest, how he had got the password and why he would not tell—­and was indeed in the fineness of its invention equally worthy of both the heart and the intellect of the theorist.

Nor were mistress Fuller’s resolves behind her conclusions in merit:  of all times since first she had learned to mistrust her, this night must Dorothy be watched; and it was with a gush of exultation over her own acuteness that she saw her follow the men who bore Richard from the hall.