Recovering her better reason, Mary laid her detaining hand upon her before she could escape. Which of the two faces was the whiter, it were hard to say.
"It is you, Jane Hallet!"
"Yes, madam, it is me," gasped Jane in answer.
"Where have you been all this while, and whence do you come? And what brings you in this place now?"
The explanation was given in a few brief sentences. Jane, alarmed at the idea presented to her by the Grey Ladies of going out to service, against which step there existed private reasons, had taken straight refuge in Dame Dance's cottage under the cliff; she had been there ever since and was there still. Old Mrs. Dance was like a mother to her, she added; and had been in her entire confidence for a long while. As to what brought her in that place to-night, why--she was watching,--she told Miss Castlemaine with much emotion--watching for the dreadful evil that had to-night occurred.
"I have been dreading it always, madam," she said, her breath short in its agitation. "I knew, through my brother, of the work that was sometimes done here--though he betrayed it to me by accident, not intentionally. I have come to the chapel ruins of a night to see if there were preparations being made for running a cargo, and to look whether the vessel, whose shape I knew, was standing out at sea. One night in the autumn I saw them run the goods: I was watching all the while. It was one o'clock when I got home, and my aunt was fit to strike me: for I could not tell her why I stayed out."
"Watching for what?" imperiously spoke Miss Castlemaine.
"Oh, madam, don't you see?--for the preventive men. I was ever fearing that they would discover the work some night, and surprise it--as they have now done. I thought if I were on the watch for this (which nobody else, so far as I could guess, seemed to fear or think of) I might be in time to warn--to warn those who were doing it. But the officers were too cunning for me, too quick: as I stood just now looking over the low brink in the chapel ruins, I saw a boat shoot past from underneath the walls of the Nunnery, and I knew what it was. Before I got down here the fight had begun."
Jane had gone into a fit of trembling. Somehow Miss Castlemaine's heart was hardening to her.
"At nine o'clock this evening I thought I saw the vessel standing off in the far distance," resumed Jane: "so I came out later and watched her move up to her usual place, and have been watching since in the chapel ruins."