elation, Sylvia
suffered her hand to fall into her lap, and sat meditative. The history
of this desperate struggle for liberty was to her full of vague horror.
She had never before realized among what manner of men she had lived.
The sullen creatures who worked in the chain-gangs, or pulled in the
boats--their faces brutalized into a uniform blankness--must be very
different men from John Rex and his companions. Her imagination pictured
the voyage in the leaky brig, the South American slavery, the midnight
escape, the desperate rowing, the long, slow agony of starvation,
and the heart-sickness that must have followed upon recapture and
imprisonment. Surely the punishment of "penal servitude" must have been
made very terrible for men to dare such hideous perils to escape
from it. Surely John Rex, the convict, who, alone, and prostrated
by sickness, quelled a mutiny and navigated a vessel through a
storm-ravaged ocean, must possess qualities which could be put to better
use than stone-quarrying. Was the opinion of Maurice Frere the correct
one after all, and were these convict monsters gifted with unnatural
powers of endurance, only to be subdued and tamed by unnatural and
inhuman punishments of lash and chain? Her fancies growing amid the fast
gathering gloom, she shuddered as she guessed to what extremities of
evil might such men proceed did an opportunity ever come to them to
retaliate upon their gaolers. Perhaps beneath each mask of servility and
sullen fear that was the ordinary prison face, lay hid a courage and a
despair as mighty as that which sustained those ten poor wanderers over
the Pacific Ocean. Maurice had told her that these people had their
secret signs, their secret language. She had just seen a specimen of
the skill with which this very Rex--still bent upon escape--could send
a hidden message to his friends beneath the eyes of his gaolers. What
if the whole island was but one smouldering volcano of revolt and
murder--the whole convict population but one incarnated conspiracy,
bound together by crime and suffering! Terrible to think of--yet not
impossible.

Oh, how strangely must the world have been civilized, that this most
lovely corner of it must needs be set apart as a place of banishment for
the monsters that civilization had brought forth and bred! She cast her
eyes around, and all beauty seemed blotted out from the scene before
her. The graceful foliage melting into indistinctness in the gathering