Below him, outside the window at which he stood ruminating, he heard
voices mingling with the storm. He could with tolerable certainty
perceive, looking into the obscurity, that there were three men passing
close under it, carrying some very heavy burden among them.

He did not know what these three black figures in the obscurity were
about. He saw them pass round the corner of the building toward the
front, and in the lulls of the storm could hear their gruff voices
talking.

We have all experienced what a presentiment is, and we all know with
what an intuition the faculty of observation is sometimes heightened. It
was such an apprehension as sometimes gives its peculiar horror to a
dream--a sort of knowledge that what those people were about was in a
dreadful way connected with his own fate.

He watched for a time, thinking that they might return; but they did
not. He was in a state of uncomfortable suspense.

"If they want me, they won't have much trouble in finding me, nor any
scruple, egad, in plaguing me; they never have."

Sir Bale returned to his letters, a score of which he was that night
getting off his conscience--an arrear which would not have troubled him
had he not ceased, for two or three days, altogether to employ Philip
Feltram, who had been accustomed to take all that sort of drudgery off
his hands.

All the time he was writing now he had a feeling that the shadows he had