Tregenna nodded.
“Leave—him lying there—till morning!” stammered he.
And as he spoke, he replaced his cloak, as he had promised Ann that he would do, upon her quiet limbs.
It was a moment of intense horror for him: although the passion the woman had felt, or professed to feel for him had left him almost cold, it was impossible not to be moved by the sight of that form, which he had seen so full of life and fire and energy, cold and still at his feet.
He could not shake off the chilly feeling of having held converse with a creature of weird and supernatural attributes. Even when he retired to rest, leaving a sailor to watch by the corpse till morning, the thought of the woman and her strange end haunted him, would not let him rest.
It was long before he slept, and his slumber was disturbed by many an uneasy dream.
When he awoke, in the early morning light, there was a good deal of commotion on deck. On going to see what was the matter, he found that the body of Ann Price, alias “Jem Bax,” had disappeared.
At first the man who had been left in the position of watcher professed to know nothing about the strange disappearance. But, upon being questioned with some shrewdness by Tregenna, he confessed that a small boat had come alongside about two hours before daybreak, with a couple of men whom he did not know, who asked what had become of “Jem.”
With a sailor’s superstition, he had been only too glad to tell them of what had happened, and to let them carry away the body in their boat, still covered with Tregenna’s cloak.
The last he had seen of them was that, in the gray dawn, they had reached the shore, and landed their silent burden with difficulty on the beach, when the tide was out and the rocks lay bare and cold in the morning mist.