CHAPTER XXIV.
DORA’S SURPRISE.
Midnight found the night calm, quiet, lovely.
The roaring winds had ceased, and the clouds had been suddenly swept aside by a master-hand, and the blue-vaulted heavens, studded with their sparkling gems, looked serenely down upon earth and sea. Our weary travelers lay wholly unconscious of the change without, their eyelids heavy with the weight of sleep, and their bodies cumbered with its powerful influence.
But see! Suddenly their white-draped couch begins to move! Slowly, silently, steadily, it commences to descend!
Heavens! Will not some one warn those unconscious sleepers? Will not some one bid them awake, arise, and flee?
Ah! but what could two such defenseless women do against the powers at work.
They could not escape even should they awake, for the entrance to that innocent looking white cottage was closely guarded, and none could enter or retreat without the knowledge and consent of that rough, stern sentinel!
Reader, you doubtless recognize the place as the same to which Robert Ellerton was so adroitly enticed and made a prisoner.
The villain who had knocked madam’s faithful driver senseless from his seat had driven the unsuspecting women back, though by an unfrequented road, to the German settlement which they had but just left. And now they were in the power of a band of heartless villains, sleeping as calmly and sweetly as if no such thing as danger or treachery inhabited the earth!
Softly, gently as a tender mother would bear her slumbering infant upon her bosom, their bed descended through the floor, down, down—twenty, yes, thirty feet, when it was received by four muffled figures and carefully wheeled to one side of a most gorgeous apartment, which contained every comfort and luxury that the most fastidious could desire; after which the trap noiselessly ascended to its place, leaving no crack or crevice by which its existence could possibly be detected!