“But Myra—dear cousin!”
“I tell you, Edie, there is not an hour passes without my seeing him once more before me holding my hand, with his eyes telling me that I am his wife, and,” she cried passionately as a low tapping was heard at the door, “I am waiting for the day when he will be released and come, wherever I may be, to claim me and bid me follow him, whatever may be his future. And I shall have to go—I shall have to go.”
“Myra,” whispered Edie, throwing her arms about her cousin’s neck, “hush, pray! Pray hush! Auntie is at the door; she must not hear you talk like this. These terrible fits are only for me to hear; my own sister, pray, pray be calm.”
Her touch, her kisses, had the desired effect; and as the tapping at the door was resumed, Myra sank down sobbing on a chair, and buried her flushed face in Edie’s breast.
Chapter Seventeen.
Breaking the Cage.
Night at The Foreland—and a dark night; the moon not due for hours, and when she rose not likely to be seen for the heavy clouds which blotted out the stars. Lights were out in the great building, which stood up by day gloomy, many-windowed, and forbidding on the huge promontory, crossed by wall and works, and with sentries between the convict establishment and the mainland. The other three sides had the waves, which washed the nearly perpendicular precipices, for warders, and it was only here and there that an active man well acquainted with the cliffs could descend to the sea, and such an acquaintanceship was not likely to be made by the wretched men marched out, fettered and guarded, to the great quarries day after day, and then carefully watched back to their cells.
At times the sentinel duty outside the building could easily be relaxed on the sea side, for the billows came thundering in, smiting the polished rocks and flying high in air with a deafening din; but on a calm, warm, dark night, when it was possible for a boat to approach close in, a stricter watch was kept, lest one of the more hardened prisoners should contrive to elude the vigilance within the buildings and make a desperate effort to win his freedom.