faced the south, and he
thought, "This is the last sunset I shall ever see." He had the strong
abiding faith of his time and party, and he looked beyond the clouds
with an awe and a light in his eyes. Verses learnt at his mother's knee
came back to him; he said them over to himself, and the tender, solemn,
beneficent words fell like balm upon his troubled heart. He thought of
his mother who had died young, and then of scenes and occurrences of his
childhood. All earthly hope was past, there could be no more struggling;
in a little while he would be dead. Dying, his mind reverted, not to the
sordid misery from which death would set him free, but to the long past,
to the child at the mother's knee, to the boy who had climbed down great
cliffs in search of a smuggler's cave. The unearthly light that rests
upon that time so far behind us shone strong for him--he saw every twig
in the rooks' nests in the lofty elms, every ivy leaf about a ruined
oriel, black against a gold sky; the cool, dark smell of the box alleys
filled his nostrils; the sound of the sea came to him; he heard his
mother singing on the terrace. He bowed his face with a sudden rain of
tender, not sorrowful, tears.

Something crashed in at the window, splintering the coarse glass and
falling upon the floor at a little distance from him. It was a large
pebble, to which was tied a piece of paper. He started up and made for
it, to be brought up within two feet of it by the tug of the rope which
bound him to the wall. He thought a moment, then lay down upon the floor
and found that he could touch the end of the string that tied the paper
to the pebble. He took it between his teeth and slowly drew it towards
him, then, rising to his knees, he strained with all his might at the
cords that bound his arms. They were tightly drawn, but when at length
he desisted, panting, he had so loosened them that he could move one
hand a very little way. With it and with his teeth he disengaged the
paper from the pebble and spread it upon his knee. There was just light
enough to read the sprawling schoolboy hand with which it was covered.
It ran thus:--

"I don't know as this will ever reach you. I am doing all I can. Luiz
Sebastian has not let me get at arm's length from him since I overheard
him and the Turk, and a sailor from Captain Laramore's ship and _Roach_
at the hut on the marsh, two hours ago. They would have killed me there,
but I ran, and he did not catch me until I