"

"Presently," answered Lady Audley. "I'm dressed, you see."

Alicia ran off, but Sir Michael's wife still lingered in the quadrangle,
still waited for those tidings which were so long coming.

It was nearly dark. The blue mists of evening had slowly risen from the
ground. The flat meadows were filled with a gray vapor, and a stranger
might have fancied Audley Court a castle on the margin of a sea. Under
the archway the wordnetfear of fastcoming night lurked darkly, like traitors
waiting for an opportunity to glide stealthily into the quadrangle.
Through the archway a patch of cold blue sky glimmered faintly, streaked
by one line of lurid crimson, and lighted by the dim glitter of one
wintry-looking star. Not a creature was stirring in the quadrangle but
the restless woman who paced up and down the straight pathways,
listening for a footstep whose coming was to strike wordnetfear to her .
She heard it at last!--a footstep in the avenue upon the other side of
the archway. But was it the footstep? Her sense of hearing, made
unnaturally acute by , told her that it was a man's
footstep--told even more, that it was the tread of a gentleman, no
slouching, lumbering pedestrian in hobnailed