Page 89 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

CHAPTER VIII. A

DANGEROUS CRISIS.

t was late in the afternoon when Sarah Purfoy awoke
Ifrom her uneasy slumber. She had been dreaming of the
deed she was about to do, and was flushed and feverish; but,
mindful of the consequences which hung upon the success
or failure of the enterprise, she rallied herself, bathed her
face and hands, and ascended with as calm an air as she
could assume to the poop-deck.
Nothing was changed since yesterday. The sentries’
arms glittered in the pitiless sunshine, the ship rolled and
creaked on the swell of the dreamy sea, and the prison-cage
on the lower deck was crowded with the same cheerless fig-
ures, disposed in the attitudes of the day before. Even Mr.
Maurice Frere, recovered from his midnight fatigues, was
lounging on the same coil of rope, in precisely the same po-
sition.
Yet the eye of an acute observer would have detected
some difference beneath this outward varnish of similar-
ity. The man at the wheel looked round the horizon more
eagerly, and spit into the swirling, unwholesome-looking
water with a more dejected air than before. The fishing-lines
still hung dangling over the catheads, but nobody touched
them. The soldiers and sailors on the forecastle, collected

For the Term of His Natural Life