CHAPTER XIX.
MIDNIGHT SURPRISE.
The night began to wane, and still did Lucy Munro keep lonely vigil in her chamber.

How could she sleep?
Threatened with a connection so dreadful as to her mind was that proposed with Guy Rivers--deeply interested as she now felt herself in the fortunes of the young stranger, for whose fate and safety, knowing the unfavorable position in which he stood with the outlaws, she had everything to apprehend--it can cause no wonder when we say sleep grew a stranger to her eyes, and without retiring to her couch, though extinguishing her light, she sat musing by the window of her chamber upon the thousand conflicting and sad thoughts that were at strife in her spirit.

She had not been long in this position when the sound of approaching horsemen reached her ears, and after a brief interval, during which she could perceive that they had alighted, she heard the door of the hall gently unclosed, and footsteps, set down with nice caution, moving through the passage.

A light danced for a moment fitfully along the chamber, as if borne from the sleeping apartment of Munro to that adjoining the hall in which the family were accustomed to pursue their domestic avocations.

Then came an occasional murmur of speech to her ears, and then silence.
Perplexed with these circumstances, and wondering at the return of Munro at an hour something unusual--prompted too by a presentiment of something wrong, and apprehensive on the score of Ralph's safety--a curiosity not, surely, under these circumstances, discreditable, to know what was going on, determined her to ascertain something more of the character of the nocturnal visitation.