count upon
you." And we pulled from it reluctantly out into the broad sea, and
breathed a full breath as we left its vapours and its fetid shores.

Three shots were fired at us while we crossed the open channel, and one
fell so close that we could see the cleavage of the water and feel the
silver spray upon our heated faces. This quickened our oars, you may be
sure, and set our course true and straight for the house, whose iron
gate stood up like a fortress of the deep and opened its rocky shelter
to us. Clair-de-Lune was there, too, halted and motionless by the sea's
brink; Dolly Venn stood at his side; and once I thought that I saw Miss
Ruth herself peering across the lapping wavelets and watching us with a
woman's anxious eyes.

Nor did we go unobserved by those who had so much to gain if mischance
should befall us in that last endeavour. Like pirates' junks, slipping
from a sheltered creek, the devils in the longboats espied us in the
moonlight and began to row towards us and to hail us with those wild
shouts which yesterday we had heard even in the House Under the Sea.
Yet, I witness, they did not affright us. We knew that sure eyes
watched them from the reef; no lads' playing at the length of a
watchdog's chain, kept more surely from the dog's teeth than those
night-birds from the gun's range. Shots they fired--wild, reckless
shots, skimming the water, peppering the sky, whistling in the clear
air above us. But the boats drew no nearer, and it seemed that we must
touch our haven unharmed, when the American seaman, stretching out his
arms in a gesture fearful to think of, and ceasing to row with horrid
suddenness, fell backward without any word and lay, a dying man, before
us.

They had shot him through the heart; and he was the second who fell for
Ruth Bellenden's sake.

_Sunday morning. Five o'clock._

I have known little sleep for the last thirty hours, nor can I sleep at
the crisis of our misfortunes. It is a still grey morning, with heavy
cloud in the East, and lapping rhythmical waves beating upon the
windows of the house as though anon a gale must blow and all this
torrid silence be swept away.

I cannot conceal it from myself what a gale would mean to us; how it
must scatter the open boats, drifting there at the mercy of a Pacific
sea; how, perchance, it might even lift the fog from Ken's Island and
show us sunny fields and sylvan woods, a harbourage of delight to which
all might flock with leaping