She ate scarcely anything; she seemed hurried, frequently glancing at the clock; and she lost herself in reverie.

Discovering that his eye was upon her, she betrayed uneasiness, and began to talk without considering what she meant to say.

All this might mean nothing more than her barely-concealed regret at being obliged to leave London; but Widdowson remarked it with a vivacity of feeling perhaps due to the excitement in which he had lived for the past week.

Perhaps the activity, the resolution to which he had urged himself, caused a sharpening of his perceptions.

And the very thought, never out of his mind, that only a few days had to elapse before he carried off his wife from the scene of peril, tended to make him more vividly conscious of that peril.