“Art sure?” cried Gil, with a sigh of relief.
“Sartain, skipper. She was almost gone before.”
“Heaven forgive her!” said Gil, softly. “Wat, lay her decently in the furthest part of the store till we can put her to rest. See that a couch is ready. Poor sweet! she cannot bear the light.”
As he spoke, handling her as tenderly as if she had been an infant, Gil rose up and bore the insensible girl into the store, where the state of the objects around told him plainly that she must have been a prisoner for months.
In a few minutes’ time he had her lying upon a bed of soft heather, softened with a sail and a couple of heavy cloaks for coverlids, as he sought to infuse warmth, and with it life.
As evening came on, Gil knelt beside the motionless figure upon the rough couch, in an agony of spirit, for, in spite of all his efforts, Mace seemed to be slipping away from him once again.
He had fancied that the marble coldness that had struck a chill to his heart was not so marked, but he could not be sure; and at last, after trickling spirits between the white lips, and trying all he could to promote warmth, he knelt there waiting despairingly for the result.
The sun had descended beyond the hills, turning the far west into one blaze of mellow golden glory; there was a faint twittering from the linnets and finches that hung about the bushes on the steep slopes and crags; and on one rugged old hawthorn, whose roots were thrust amongst the rifts and crags of the sandstone, a solitary thrush was singing his evening hymn.
As Gil watched the face of her who lay there as rigid almost as if in death, it seemed to him that the soft sweet face that looked so smooth and young, and yet so old, was not so ashy white as a short time before; but directly after he realised the fact that the warm sunset flush was reflected into the store, and with a groan of despair he bent down and kissed the cold lips, and tried to breathe into the icy frame the vigour that throbbed and bounded in every nerve and vein of his own.
But no: there was no movement, and at last, when Wat Kilby came softly up to say that one of the look-out men had encountered a Roehurst founder, and learned from him that Sir Mark and Mistress Anne were married and gone away, and that there was no pursuit, Gil bade him sternly begone, for he muttered: