“Come,” she exclaimed, “we must go at once. Don’t speak, sweetheart. Silence; come, Constance, quick!”
“Yes, yes; go on,” was Constance’s almost hysterical reply.
And so, with the child in her arms and Virginia pulling at her sleeves to guide and hasten her, they groped as cautiously as possible in the darkness, towards the cabin door.
They had proceeded a few paces when Virginia, in her eagerness, rubbed against the table; she stepped aside to clear it, and in doing so, jolted Constance.
It was then, under the strain of the stiffled emotions of the past few days, and the great excitement attendant on the present enterprise, together with the sudden reactionary joy of again clasping her child, that the first symptom of the mother’s mental breakdown occurred.
“Oh,” she faintly screamed, “the boat rocks,” and she would have fallen to the floor had not a chair, the only one in the cabin, luckily stood nearby. She stumbled against it and sank upon the seat, with Dorothy tightly clasped in her arms.
Unable in the darkness to comprehend the pause, Virginia tugged urgently at Constance’s sleeve.
“Come along, dear, we must be quick.”
“Very well! Why don’t you use the paddles?” replied Constance, in an altered tone, a strange metallic ring in her voice, and with less agitation than she had recently displayed.
Still unable, or rather refusing herself to think anything was wrong, and with a panicky impatience to be gone from the den, Virginia again urged Constance to hasten.