If ever miserable wretch prayed for the light of returning day that wretch was Harry Vine. It seemed hours of agony during which the water hissed and surged all round him, as if in search of the victim who has escaped before the faint light in the east began to give promise of the morn.
Two or three times over he had noted a lantern far out toward the distant harbour, but to all appearances the search had ceased for the night, and he was too cold and mentally stunned to heed that now.
He had some idea of where he must be—some three miles from the little harbour, but he could not be sure, and the curve outward of the land hid the distant light.
Once or twice he must have slept and dreamed in a fevered way, for he started into wakefulness with a cry of horror, to sit chilled and helpless for the rest of the night, trying to think out his future, but in a confused, dreamy way that left him where he had started at the first.
As the day broke he knew exactly where he was, recollecting the rock as one to which he had before now rowed with one of the fishermen, the deep chasms at its base being a favourite resort of conger. Hard by were the two zorns to which they had made the excursion that day, and searched for specimens for his father’s hobby—that day when he had overbalanced himself and fallen in.
Those zorns! either of those caves would form a hiding place.
“That is certain to be seen,” he said bitterly, and with the feeling upon him that even then some glass might be directed toward the isolated rock on which he sat, a hundred yards from the cliff, in a part where the shore was never bared even at the lowest tides, he began to lower himself into the deep water to swim ashore and climb up the face of the cliff in search of some hiding place.
He was bitterly cold and longing for the sunshine, so that he might gain a little warmth for his chilled limbs, and under the circumstances it seemed in his half-dried condition painful in the extreme to plunge into the water again.
Half in he held on by the side of the barnacle-covered rock, and scanned the face of the cliff, nearly perpendicular facing there, and seeming to offer poor foothold unless he were daring in the extreme.
He was too weak and weary to attempt it, and he turned his eyes to the right with no better success.