Three figures turned into Boulder Lane as the motor car flashed past, but the girls were too intent on their conversation to notice them. The first, who was a tall, stout woman, walked stoically along with the tread of a grenadier. She carried a large suit case with one hand and an enormous bundle with the other. Her two upper teeth protruding over her lower lip gave her that strange animal look which Billie had disliked so much. For it was Mme. Alta, as you have no doubt guessed, trudging up Boulder Lane. Her daughter, Francesca, walked behind. She also carried a suit case and a bundle. Occasionally she flashed a look of hatred back to the lights of West Haven, which place she had never loved.
Can this be Belle Rogers who brings up the procession, staggering under a heavy satchel and moaning and weeping as she stumbles along?
“I am glad I left word that I had gone out to spend the night,” she said to herself. “At least, they won’t know it for a while, and it will be too late then.”
It was a long walk before they reached the end of Boulder Lane and found themselves on the beach of the little cove. The lights of the ship made a rippling, cheerful track on the water, but Belle shivered when she saw the black hull outlined in the darkness.
Several men were waiting for them near a boat, which had been moored on the beach, and presently the three women climbed in; their luggage was piled at one end and they were rowed away in the darkness. Two wagons came lumbering up the beach, and half the night, Belle, who was tossing feverishly in her stuffy berth, trying to stifle her sobs, heard the sailors loading a cargo, while the boats plied back and forth from the shore to the ship.
There was no wind that night and an ominous silence seemed to brood over the sea. At last in the stillness, Belle slept. Toward morning she was awakened by the sound of a voice. A man in a small boat just below her porthole was calling up to some one on deck.
“Hello, Captain, it’s Ruiz. I’m coming aboard. We must sail by dawn. They’ve got word about us. If that girl has turned traitor, she shall pay for it.”
Belle could not hear the captain’s reply, but he must have made some objection to sailing that morning, for the man named Ruiz answered:
“Storm or no storm, I’m master here, and I say we sail at once.”
And sail they did without more argument. She could hear the sailors running about the ship. The masts creaked and groaned. Chains rattled. Presently the boat was in motion, and from her porthole she saw the familiar shores glide past her.