[37]

“Good-bye, my Randolph—my husband—good-bye. Yes, I do bid you do your duty. May God bless and keep you always.”

For a moment they stood together, heart pressed to heart, their lips meeting in one long, lingering kiss; for one moment a strange shadow as of farewell seemed to hang upon them, and they clung together as if no power on earth could separate them.

The next moment he was gone, and Monica, left alone, stretched out her hands in the darkness.

“Oh, my love! my love!”

It was the one irrepressible cry from the depths of her heart; the next moment she repeated dreamily to herself the words that had lately passed her husband’s lips:

[38]

[38]

“‘Whatever happens, we are in God’s hands. Remember that always.’ Randolph, I will! I will!”

A ringing cheer told her that the boat was off. Nobody had seen the slim figure that had slunk after Randolph down to the beach. No one, in the darkness and general excitement, had seen that same slim figure leap lightly and noiselessly into the boat, and crouch down in the extreme end of the bow.

Conrad Fitzgerald had witnessed the parting between husband and wife; he had heard every word that had passed between them; and now, as he crouched with a tiger-like ferocity in the bottom of the boat, he muttered:

“This time he shall not escape me!”

[39]

[39]

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH. WIDOWED.

The boat launched by the rescuing party vanished in the darkness. Monica stood where her husband had left her in the shelter of the cliff, her pale face turned seawards, her eyes fixed upon the glimmering crests of the great waves, as they came rolling calmly in, in their resistless might and majesty.

Beatrice had twice come back to her, to assure her with eager vehemence that the danger was very slight, that it was lessening every moment as the wind shifted and abated in force—dangerous, indeed, for the [40]poor fellows in the doomed vessel that had struck upon 

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