'I cannot bring myself to part from you under this delicious moon, Winnie, if you will stay a few minutes longer. Let us go and sit on that very boulder where little Hal proposed to you.'
'But you want to go into the church,' said Winifred, as we moved back towards the boulder.
'No, I will leave that till the morning. I would leave anything till the morning, to have a few minutes longer with you on the sands. Try to imagine that we are children again, and that I am not the despised rich man but little Hal the cripple.'
Winifred's eyes, which had begun to look very troubled, sparkled with delight.
'But,' said she with a sigh, as we sat down on the boulder, 'I'm afraid we sha'n't be able to stay long. See how the tide is rising, and the sea is wild. The tides just now, father says, come right up to the cliff in the cove, and once locked in between Flinty Point and Needle Point there is no escape.'
'Yes, darling,' I muttered to myself, drawing her to me and burying my face in her bosom, 'there is one escape, only one.'
For death seemed to me the only escape from a tragedy far, far worse than death.
If she made me any answer I heard it not; for, as I sat there with closed eyes, schemes of escape fluttered before me and were dismissed at the rate of a thousand a second. A fiery photograph of the cove was burning within my brain, my mind was absorbed in examining every cranny and every protuberance in the semicircular wall of the cliff there depicted; over and over again I was examining that brain-picture, though I knew every inch of it, and knew there was not in the cliff-wall foothold for a squirrel.
X
The moon mocked me, and seemed to say: