Robin quitted the place without replying to her entreaty; and when the Buccaneer spoke, it was in that low and broken voice which tells of the soul's agony.
"Why call me stranger?" he said, approaching, and tenderly taking her hand; "you have seen me before."
"Yes, good sir, the night previous to my dear lady's death—it is an ill omen to see strangers for the first time where there is death. I thank you, sir, I will not sit. May I not go after Robin?"
"Then you prefer Robin to me?"
"So please ye, sir; I have known Robin a long, long time, and he knows my father: perhaps you, too, may know him, sir; you look of the sea, and I am sure my father is a sailor. Do you know my father?"
The gentle girl, forgetting her natural timidity under the influence of a stronger principle, seized the hand of the Buccaneer, and gazed into his face with so earnest and so beseeching a look, that if Robin had not returned on the instant, the Skipper would have betrayed the secret he was so anxious to preserve until (to use his own expression) "he was a free man, able to look his own child in the face."
"He is at the entrance, sure enough," said Robin; "but it will occupy him longer to climb the rocks than it did to descend them; we can take the hollow path, and be far on the road to Cecil Place before he arrives at the summit."
"But what can we do with her?—She must not longer breathe the air of this polluted nest," argued Dalton, all the father [overflowing] at his heart; "if we delay, Burrell may see her: if so, all is over."
"I can creep along the earth like a mocking lapwing," she replied. "Let me but out of this place, I can hide in some of the cliff-holes—any where out of this, and," she whispered Robin, "away—above all things away—from that fearful man."
"To Cecil Place at once then, Captain; the delay of half an hour may seal his doom. I will place Barbara in a nook of the old tower, where nothing comes but bats and mice; and, as it overlooks the paths, she can see from it the road that Burrell takes, and so avoid him when returning."