“That’s right,” continued Hume, with assumed cheerfulness. “Now do you make your reckonings, and we’ll stand away for the nearest port.”
“That will be Ascension,” said Webster, after a pause.
They arrived at Ascension on a blazing hot day, and dropped anchor in the blue waters of the little bay, enclosed, not like Funchal, in a setting of green, but by an arid shore, with a waste of sands stretching back to a lofty, sun-baked hill, on which glowed one solitary spot of green. There was the Convent of Sisters, and thither was Miss Anstrade taken in a slow-moving cart.
Hume and Webster returned to the dirty little town, flanked on the inland side by a series of pits sunk in the sand for the habitation of pigs. Here they sadly arranged for the salvage of the Irene, and her crew shipped home on board a Cape steamer, they themselves remaining till Miss Anstrade was pronounced well enough, when they determined to take her passage on the first homeward-bound passenger boat.
Within the patio of the white-walled convent, where the hot air was cooled by swinging mats and the spray of a fountain, Miss Anstrade, within a week of her arrival, was reclining in a long wickerwork chair, with two young men at her side. She had quickly recovered under the tender hands of the sisters, and was now listening to the plans made for her departure for England. She was dressed in white, with a rich red rose for her only ornament, and a deep pallor in her cheeks from her recent illness, her figure, by contrast with the sun-browned men at her side, looking altogether slight and delicate.
“I understand you are not returning to England; what, then, if I may ask, are your intentions? You surely do not mean to remain on this cinder?”
“Do you remember,” said Hume, “what I told you of the Golden Rock?”
“A long time since, was it not? but I remember it well, and the strange feeling of second sight that came upon me, so that it seemed to me I saw the flash and sparkle of the Rock in a savage land. I weaved a romance about it in that time before—before the world changed to me.”
The two men looked inquiringly at each other, for they had found no romance in the thought of the Rock, only a thought of money.
“Everyone,” she continued, in a dreamy voice, “has a Golden Rock somewhere within the sweep of his horizon—a gleaming spot of brightness that fills them in times of depression with hope of better things. But you have not told me.”