CHAPTER XXXIII
ON THE SANDS
A man, bearing in his arms the motionless form of a woman, paused later that night in the shadow of a low stone hovel, near the lower gate of the Mount. As he crouched beneath the thatch projecting like the rim of an old hat above him his eyes, eager, fierce, studied the distance he had yet to traverse from the end of the narrow alley, where he had stopped, to the open entrance at the base of the rock to the sands. The goal was not far; but a few moments would have sufficed to reach it; only between him and the point he had so long been striving to attain, an obstacle, or group of obstacles, intervened. Before a bonfire of wreckage of stuff—furniture and household goods—several ragged, dissolute fellows sat with bottles before them, drinking hard and quarreling the while over a number of glittering gems, gold snuff-boxes and trinkets of all kinds.
"This bit of ivory for the white stone!"
"Add the brooch!"
"Not I! Look at the picture! Her ladyship, perhaps!"
"They have not found her?"
"No; for all the searching! But she is somewhere; can't have escaped from the Mount. And when the drabs and trulls lay hands on her!"
"Ay, when!" casting the dice.