Landon nodded.
"Do you hear, my friend, do you hear?" he cried, thrusting his foot against Aylmer's cheek. "You have wriggled well in my coils—I grant you that. You have twisted and, for the moment, escape seemed open—wide open—before you. But against me? No one prevails there, no one!"
"One may—yet."
The voice was Claire's. Landon wheeled towards her.
"That shows a very determined optimism, sister-in-law," he said. "And who, if the knowledge is not privileged?"
"God," she said quietly, and met his eyes unflinchingly.
CHAPTER XXV
FATE'S FINAL WORD
Storm, darkness, despair—these had been the sole comrades for the two who lay bound in their old quarters in the Santa Margarita's lazaret. Within a few minutes of the moment in which Padre Sigismondi had succumbed to the islander's treacherous hospitality, those who had sought his protection had been prisoners once more, and the felucca's mast had been stepped anew. For three hours it had bent before the strength of the northern wind—the hot, oppressive breath which seemed to blow no longer from Nature's lips but in her very face. For it was an unnatural wind—in temperature, in the quarter from which it came, in dampness. The rigging slackened in the humid gusts, but the great sail bellied out magnificently. They had torn across the broad waste of waters at racing speed. Captain Luigi announced with legitimate pride that they had come a matter of five and fifty kilometres. The land loomed up before them mountainously a short five miles away.