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expand1997 (1)
1Author:  Simms William Gilmore 1806-1870Add
 Title:  Guy Rivers  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: The night began to wane, and still did Lucy Munro keep lonely vigil in her chamber. How could she sleep? Threatened herself with a connexion 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 unfavourable position in which he stood with the outlaws, she had every thing 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, as if set down with a nice caution, passing 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. She felt assured from the strangeness of the occurrence that evil was afoot, and solicitous for its prevention, she was persuaded to the measure solely with the view to good. Hastily, yet cautiously, but with trembling hands, undoing the door of her apartment, she made her way into the long and dark gallery, with which she was perfectly familiar, and soon gained the apartment already referred to. The door fortunately stood nearly closed, and she was therefore enabled to pass it by and gain the hall, which immediately adjoined, and lay in perfect darkness; without herself being seen, she was enabled, through a crevice in the partition dividing the two rooms, to survey its inmates, and to hear distinctly at the same time every thing that was uttered. As she expected, there were the two conspirators, Rivers and Munro, earnestly engaged in discourse; to which, as it concerns materially our progress, we may well be permitted to lend our attention. They spoke on a variety of topics entirely foreign to the understanding of the half-affrighted and nervously-susceptible, but still resolute young girl who heard them; and nothing but her deep anxieties for one, whose own importance in her eyes at that moment she did not conjecture, could have sustained her while listening to a dialogue full of atrocious intention and development, and larded throughout with a familiar and sometimes foul phraseology that certainly was not altogether unseemly in such association.
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