er which gives up to him
everything I have in the world. He has no more use for me, Jasper; none
at all! He has sent my only living relative away from me. When you go
back to England they will tell you that I am dead. And it will be
true--true; oh, I know that it will be true."

She had come to a very low state, I make sure, to utter such a word as
this, and it was a sorry thing for me to hear. To console her when I
myself was in a parlous plight was just as though one drowning man
should hold out his hand to another. To-morrow I myself might be flung
into that very ocean whose breakers I could hear rolling over the glass
of the curtained windows. And what of little Ruth then?

That question I did not answer. Words were on my lips--such words as a
driven man may speak--when there came to us from the sea without the
boom of a distant gun, and, Miss Ruth springing to her feet, I heard a
great bell clang in the house and the rush of men and the pattering of
steps; and together, the woman I loved and I, we stood with beating
hearts and white faces, and told each other that a ship was on the
rocks and that Edmond Czerny's devils were loose.

CHAPTER XVIII

CHANCE OPENS A GATE FOR JASPER BEGG, AND HE PASSES THROUGH

The devils were out; never once did I doubt it. The alarm bell ringing
loudly in the corridor, the tramp of feet as of an army marching, the
cry of man to man proclaimed the fact beyond any cavil. If the clang of
arms and the loud word of command had found me unwilling to believe
that sailors must die that night on the reef to the southward side, the
voice of Edmond Czerny himself, crying by the very door behind which I
stood, would have answered the question for good and all. For Czerny I
heard, I would have staked my life on it--Czerny, whom last I had seen
at Nice on the morning of his marriage.

"To the work, to the work!" I heard him shouting; "let Steinvertz come
to me. There is a ship on the Caskets--a ship, do you hear?"

His voice was hoarse and high-pitched, like the voice of a man half mad
with delirium. Those that answered him spoke in terms not less
measured. Had a pack of wild hounds been slipped suddenly to its prey,
no howls more terrifying could have been heard than those which echoed
in that house of mystery. And then, upon the top of the clamour, as
though to mark the meaning of it, came silence, a silence so awesome
that I could hear myself breathing.

"They've left the house, then,"