But one morning, when he awoke, a confused murmur broke upon his ear.
Peering over the ledge, he saw a crowd of soldiers standing on the
shingle at the mouth of the cavern.

"Come down and surrender, in the name of the emperor!" cried the
sergeant.

"Surrender!" shouted all his men. And the vast, dim place rang with the
echoing sound of their voices.

"You can have my dead body if you care to come up here for it!" cried
Rohan, stepping into the light that fell from the hole in the cliff.

The soldiers stared up in astonishment when Rohan appeared on the ledge
of the precipice. He was now a gaunt, forlorn, hunted man, with a few
rags hanging about his body, and a great shock of yellow hair tumbling
below his shoulders. Under the stress of mental suffering his flesh had
wasted from his bones, but his eyes flashed with a terrible light.

"Come down," said the sergeant, raising his gun, "or I will pick you off
your perch as if you were a crow."

Instead of getting behind a rock, Rohan stood up with a strange smile on
his face, and said, "If you want me, you must come and fetch me."

There was a flash, a roar--the sergeant had fired. But when the smoke
had cleared away, Rohan was still standing on the ledge with the strange
smile on his face. The shot had gone wide.

"You can smile," said the sergeant angrily, "but you cannot escape. If I
cannot bring you down, I will starve you out. My men are watching for
you, above and below. You are surrounded."

"And so are you," said Rohan, with a laugh, pointing to the mouth of the
cavern. "Look behind you!"

The sergeant and his men turned round, and gave a cry of dismay. The
tide had turned, and the sea was surging fiercely into the mouth of the
cavern.

"Give him one volley," shouted the sergeant, "and then swim for your
lives."

But when the men turned to aim at Rohan, he was no longer visible. They
fired at random at the hole in the cliff, and after filling the great
cavern with drifting smoke and echoing thunder, they fled for their
lives, wading, swimming through the high spring tide.

"At any rate," said the sergeant, when they had all got safely back to
land, "we can stop Mother Gwenfern from bringing the mad rebel any more
food."

So a watch was set over the cottage in which Rohan's widowed mother
lived, and she was always searched whenever she left her house, and
bands of armed men kept guard night and day by the hole at the top of
the cliff and by the s