"Listen at the secret door," exclaimed the Buccaneer. "When he cannot

find you above, he will seek you at the only entrance he knows of: I

need not say, answer not the sign."

"Robin, Robin!" ejaculated Barbara, "take me, oh! take me with you!--You

are not, surely, going to leave me in this horrid place, and with a

stranger too!"

Poor Dalton! what painful and powerful emotions convulsed his heart and

features!--"a stranger!"--a stranger, indeed, to his own child!

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."




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