“Take care, Rosanne. Don't stumble, darling!” said the man to whom Elizabeth had been married by a law she respected until a higher law unhusbanded her.
Cecilia noted the passionate clutch of her hand and its withdrawal without touching him as he lurched over a rock.
He put his wife tenderly in the boat and then turned with kind formality to Elizabeth; but Ludlow had helped her.
“Well, bon voyage,” said the lighthouse-keeper. “Mind you run up the lantern on the mast as soon as you get aboard. I don't think there'll be any chase. The Irish have freed their minds.”
“I'll send your fishing-boat back as soon as I can, Ludlow.”
“Turn it over to father; he'll see to it. Give him news of us and our love to all the folks. He will be anxious to know the truth about Beaver.”
“Good-bye, Elizabeth and Rosanne!”
“Good-bye, Cecilia!”
A grinding on pebbles, then the thump of adjusted oars and the rush of water on each side of a boat's course, marked the fugitives' progress towards the anchored smack.
Suspended on starlit waters as if in eternity, and watching the smoke of her past go up from a looted island, Elizabeth had the sense of a great company around her. The uninstructed girl from the little kingdom of Beaver divined a worldful of souls waiting and loving in hopeless silence and marching resistlessly as the stars to their reward. For there is a development like the unfolding of a god for those who suffer in strength and overcome.