But the sunlight also discovered many more wretches made homeless by the flood, and now sitting and shuddering upon the rocks, up and down the mountain sides.
But the dwellings of all those who had been so fortunate as to escape injury by the flood, were freely opened to receive the homeless sufferers.
It was late in the day before the condition of the ground enabled Lyon Berners, attended by some villagers, to seek the site of the late prison.
Not a vestige of the building remained. The very spot on which it had once stood was unrecognizable—a vast morass of mud and wreck.
The warden and his family, with Miss Pendleton and a few of the officers of the prison, were found about a mile beyond the scene, grouped together on a high hill, and utterly overcome, in mind and body, by the combined influences of cold and hunger, grief and horror.
"For the Lord's sake, where is my wife? where is Sybil?" anxiously inquired Lyon Berners, though scarcely knowing whether he hoped or feared she might be alive.
Beatrix Pendleton, who had sat with her head bowed down upon her knees, now raised it and said:
"Heaven knows! I tried to make them go and save her; but they would not! I refused to leave the prison without her, but they forced me on the boat."
"We couldn't have saved her," spoke the warden; "her cell was right at the corner of the building, at the joining of the creek and the river. It was overflowed before we got there, and the water, which must a busted in the window, was a rushing down the corridor and filling up the place so fast, that we had to run up the stairs to the next story to save our own lives."
"Heaven's will be done!" groaned Lyon Berners, who, heart-broken as he was, scarcely understood or believed the warden's explanation, or knew whether he himself were merely resigned, or really rejoiced that his wife had met this fate now, rather than lived to await a still more horrible one.