At midnight the mist began to lift almost as suddenly as it had come on. The whole blue arch of heaven became revealed. The moon was now at its full, and the cold, pallid light shone over the island with its dark woods, and its ivory-white temple on the hill-top, the fallen shrine of love.
Paul mounted this hill and glanced over the sea in all directions; but his hope of seeing some barque in the vicinity of the isle was immediately extinguished. Not a sail was visible.
He had brought to the island a pair of field-glasses, and these he now directed over the channel that separated him from the Dalmatian mainland. The light was insufficient for the taking of distant observations; nevertheless, he came to the conclusion that a tiny light visible at a certain point on the coast marked the position of Castel Nuovo; and, aware that Barbara's captors must long ere this have reached their destination, this light became an object of deep interest. Without any reason whatever to guide him, he took up the belief that it marked the room in which she was detained for the night, and impressed by this fancy, he kept his eyes fixed upon it as wistfully as if it were the face of Barbara herself.
Suddenly the light vanished.
A very simple occurrence, and yet Paul had no sooner noted it than there came over him a trembling and a horror as great as if the extinction of that light had likewise involved the extinction of Barbara.
His mind was either playing him strange tricks, or else his hearing had become more than ordinarily acute. Sounds on the opposite coast seemed close at hand,—sounds of an eerie character.
The deep silence of the night was first broken by the fitful ringing of church bells; immediately afterwards came a series of reverberations which Paul could compare only with the rattling echoes produced by the discharge of artillery among lofty hills; and next there floated over the sea a prolonged cry like the wild shriek of some captured town.
Then all was still again.
What had happened along that moonlit coast?