And yet almost on the instant after suspending their flight, they had turned their faces towards it, as if some object of interest had suddenly shown itself in the surf. Object there was none, nothing but the flakes of white froth and the black vitreous waves over which it was dancing.
It was not an object, but a purpose that was engaging their attention, a resolve that had suddenly sprung up within their minds, almost as suddenly to be carried into execution. After all, their old home was not to prove so inhospitable. It would provide them with a place of concealment.
The thought occurred to all three almost at the same instant of time; though Terence was the first to give speech to it.
“By Saint Patrick!” he exclaimed, “let’s take to the wather! Them breakers ’ll give us a good hiding-place. I’ve hid before now in that same way, when taking a moonlight bath on the coast of owld Galway. I did it to scare my schoolfellows, by making believe I was drowned. What say ye to our trying it?”
His companions made no reply. They had scarce even waited for the wind-up of his harangue. Both had equally perceived the feasibility of the scheme; and yielding to a like impulse, all three started into a fresh run, with their faces turned towards the sea.
In less than a score of seconds, they had crossed the strip of strand; and in a similarly short space of time were plunging, thigh deep, through the water; still striding impetuously onward as if the intended to wade across the Atlantic.
A few more strides, however, brought them to a stand, just inside the line of breakers, where the seething waters, settling down into a state of comparative tranquillity, presented a surface variegated with large clouts of floating froth.
Amidst this mottling of white and black, even under the bright moonlight, it would have been difficult for the keenest eye to have detected the head of a human being, supposing the body to have been kept carefully submerged; and under this confidence the mids were not slow in submerging themselves.
Ducking down, till their chins touched the water, all three were soon as completely out of sight, to any eye looking from the shore, as if Neptune, pitying their forlorn condition, had stretched forth his trident with a bunch of seaweed upon its prongs, to screen and protect them.