At last, utterly worn out, the four men threw themselves on their beds and slept from sheer exhaustion. The sun was high in the sky when they came down stairs again and found Nancy waiting for them, and a smoking breakfast ready on the table. After greeting them, she pointed to the window, across the fields, almost bare of snow now and gleaming in the morning sunlight, to the bright waters of the cove. "See!" she cried, "the schooner has disappeared."
They both looked. "By Jove, it has!" exclaimed Tom, rushing to the other side of the room, and peering out at the shipless sea. "Heigho! that's a relief. Pray God we've seen the last of her. The Marquis gone, the schooner gone,—we three together once more! Perhaps we shall begin to live again. Ah!" he added more softly, glancing with sudden sympathy at Dan's white drawn face, "I forgot the poor woman across the hall."
Dan turned aside to hide his emotion, for though a load of anxiety had been lifted from his heart by the vanishing of The Southern Cross, he was sick with fear for the issue of the illness that had stricken down the woman he loved,—the woman who had proved her love for him by so terrible and so tragic a deed.
As though aware that for the moment they were best left together alone, Nancy slipped away into the kitchen.
"You love her, Dan?" asked Tom simply.
"Yes, Tom, with all my heart and soul. I staked my honour, my life, on her sincerity. And how she has proved that we were right to trust her! It can't be—she mustn't die—I couldn't bear it!"
"She'll be all right, old fellow, don't worry; trust to your mother and Nance. It is only the shock of the terrible things she went through last night. Come on, we must take something to eat. Here is Nancy back again."
There was no doubt of the fact, The Southern Cross had sailed away, vanished in the night as mysteriously as a week before she had appeared in the Strathsey and found moorings in the Cove. They did not count on the certainty of her not reappearing, however; and that night and for many nights thereafter the Inn was securely barricaded and a watch was kept, but neither then nor ever did The Southern Cross spread her sails in those waters again. She and her crew disappeared from their lives as completely as from the seas that stretched around the coast of Deal.
Tom at once was for making a search in the Oak Parlour for the hidden treasure, but for the time Dan had no heart for the undertaking. He urged delay at least until Madame de la Fontaine had recovered; and as for Nancy she would not hear of it.
"I can't bear to think of it,—of the trouble, the crime, the suffering of which it has been the cause. When our poor lady recovers, she will tell us all we need to know. I dread the Oak Parlour. I would not go into that room for anything in the world. Nor, believe me, Tom, could Dan do so now. You have guessed, haven't you, that he loves Madame de la Fontaine?"