Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/409

Rh had been this wild and wicked man's love. Now she truly realized its depth, its intensity, and its tenderness alternating with stormy blasts of passion, as he wavered between hope and fear, and the despair that was his when he knew he must lose her. Then she stooped, and, the tears streaming over her face, she kissed him on his brow, and then on his lips, and then drew back, still holding his maimed hand, with both of hers crossed over it, to her heaving bosom. Kneeling, she had her eyes on his, and his were on hers— steady, searching, but with a gentle light in them. And as she thus looked she became unconscious, and sank, still holding his hand, on the floor. At that instant, through, the smoke and raining masses of burning tobacco, plunged Oliver Menaida. He saw Judith, bent, caught her in his arms, and rushed back through the door. A moment after and he was at the entrance again, to plunge through and rescue his wounded adversary; but the moment when this could be done was past. There was an explosion above, followed by a fall as of a sheet of blue light, a curtain of fire through the mist of white smoke. No living man could pass that. Oliver went round to the window, and strove to enter by that way; the man who had taken refuge there was still in the same position, but he had torn the kerchief of Judith from the bleeding arm, and he held it to his mouth, looking with fixed eyes into the falling red and blue fires and the swirling flocks of white smoke. There were iron bars at the window. Oliver tore at these to displace them. "Coppinger!" he shouted, "stand up help me to break these bars!"

But Coppinger would not move, or, possibly, the power was gone from him. The bars were firmly set. They had been placed in the windows by Coppinger's orders and under his own supervision, to secure Othello Cottage, his store-place, against invasion by the inquisitive. At length Oliver succeeded in wrenching one bar away, and now a gap was made through which he might reach Coppinger and draw him forth through the window. He was scrambling in when the Captain staggered to his feet.