Voices were heard shouting over the water.
"We must be gone," said Constantine.
The excitement of her discovery that her lover was still living, and her bewilderment at his appearance instead of Michael, were too much for Morsinia. Constantine carried the exhausted girl into his boat, which was larger than hers. Towing her little kaik out some distance he tipped it bottom upwards, and let it drift away.
"That will stop the hounds," muttered he. "They will think you have been overturned."
With tremendous, but scarcely audible, strokes he ploughed away westward. It was not until far from all noise of the pursuers that he paused.
CHAPTER XLIX.
Imminent as was the danger still, the curiosity of both at the strangeness of the Providence which had brought them back to each other, as from the dead, was such that they must talk; and the freshness of the newly-kindled love stole many a moment for endearing embrace. Indeed an hour passed, and the night might have flown while they loitered, were it not that the rising wind brought a distant sound which awakened them to the remembrance that they were still fugitives.
Constantine at length insisted that his companion should lie upon the bottom of the boat, and take needed rest.