surf, the voice of the restless sea itself, seemed stopped. There was
not a sound--no whisper of life, as though she were alone and lost in
that stony country of which she had heard, where madmen go looking for
gold and spurn the find.

Captain Hagberd, inside his dark house, had kept on the alert. A window
ran up; and in the silence of the stony country a voice spoke above
her head, high up in the black air--the voice of madness, lies and
despair--the voice of inextinguishable hope. "Is he gone yet--that
information fellow? Do you hear him about, my dear?"

She burst into tears. "No! no! no! I don't hear him any more," she
sobbed.

He began to chuckle up there triumphantly. "You frightened him away.
Good girl. Now we shall be all right. Don't you be impatient, my dear.
One day more."

In the other house old Carvil, wallowing regally in his arm-chair, with
a globe lamp burning by his side on the table, yelled for her, in a
fiendish voice: "Bessie! Bessie! you Bessie!"

She heard him at last, and, as if overcome by fate, began to totter
silently back toward her stuffy little inferno of a cottage. It had no
lofty portal, no terrific inscription of forfeited hopes--she did not
understand wherein she had sinned.

Captain Hagberd had gradually worked himself into a state of noisy
happiness up there.