Was he mad or tipsy? was her mamma ill; or what did this person mean? She listened intently and thought she heard her own name; he was evidently addressing her, and pointing to the sea. At last his voice distinctly reached her ear.
"Look out, Miss Devereaux,—the tide is coming in!"
She glanced hastily round her, and a chill struck upon her heart, for the fragment of granite on which she sat was almost environed by the encroaching sea, and the stripe of yellow sand, by which she had been walking at the base of the cliffs, was nearly covered by the surf, which was already chafing white and angrily about the rocky headlands which formed the horns of a little bay.
Heedless of wetting her feet, Sybil gathered her skirts in her hand and rushed shoreward, when a greater terror smote her heart as she looked around her. The man on the cliff had disappeared; no aid seemed nigh, and no living thing was visible save a solitary chough or red-legged crow, which was perched on a fragment of rock, from whence he eyed her in quiet security.
She was at a part of the coast where the land receded and the sea advanced between two headlands of granite, precipitous and sheer, but crowned by groves of ancient trees. The water, as yet, was smooth as a mill-pond within the bay, and reflected in its glassy depths the coast that towered above it; while no sound came along the vast expanse of shore, save the hollow gurgle of the flowing tide, as it sought the recesses of the many caverns and fissures in the lower rocks. In the offing, however, the rising waves were edged with white, and this sign, together with the lowering sky and gathering clouds, showed that the coming night would be a rough one.
From the stripe of sandy beach, now nearly covered by the incoming sea, the only path lay round a little moss-grown slope at the base of an enormous rock, from whence it wound upward to the verge of a steep precipice and led to the deep old lane, already described. Over this mossy and angular ledge the angry tide had already rolled its spray, consequently it was too slippery for the footsteps of the affrighted girl, who, after thrice approaching it, finally shrunk back, and ran, with wetted feet, towards the centre of the bay, keeping close to the sheer cliffs, against which the flowing sea was rising fast, and beginning to surge and boom, throwing masses of foam and froth over her whole person, while the scared seagulls and puffins whirled in flights around her.
Once or twice a wild shriek escaped Sybil; then her voice began to fail her, and she could only utter prayers that were earnest, deep, and piteous.
Wildly and despairingly she looked upward to the summits of the cliffs; they were impending and inaccessible, by their gloomy outline fully illustrating the influence and fury of what is called "the Atlantic drift," which is especially turned into the Bristol Channel, where the rocks, by the waves for ever heaving and rolling in mighty undulations, are worn into concave fronts, and form thus a hopeless barrier to the shipwrecked, and to all who might seek to ascend them.
She turned seaward with haggard eyes and wrung her poor little hands; not a boat was near, and nothing now was visible between the horns of the bay save the smoke of some distant steamer, hull-down below the horizon line, as she sped on her way to the coast of Ireland. The flowing tide was above Sybil's ankles now; she knew that at high water it would mount to several feet, and that ere long her drowned corse should be dashed and battered, at the sport of the waves, against those very rocks at which she glanced so despairingly!
The man who had seen from their summit and warned her—where was he now, and who was he? He knew her name, and yet had he abandoned her to her fate in that terrible place, with the sea and the darkness closing fast around her; for the sun had set and dun clouds were piled in stormy masses now, where so lately all was golden sheen.