ened her
eyes again, and by the lights in an apparently richly curtained
room, she again beheld that figure standing by her, the glass in his
hand.

"Oh!" she gasped. "Are you alive?"

The answer was to raise her still gloved hand with substantial
fingers to a pair of lips.

"Then--then--he is safe! Thank God!" she murmured, and shut her
eyes again, dizzy and overcome, unable even to analyse her
conviction that all would be well, and that in some manner he had
come to her rescue.

"Where am I?" she murmured dreamily. "In Elf-land?"

"Yes; come to be Queen of it."

The words blended with her confused fancies. Indeed she was hardly
fully conscious of anything, except that a woman's hands were about
her, and that she was taken into another room, where her drenched
clothes were removed, and she was placed in a warm, narrow bed,
where some more warm nourishment was put into her mouth with a
spoon, after which she sank into a sleep of utter exhaustion. That
sleep lasted long. There was a sensation of the rocking of the
boat, and of aching limbs, through great part of the time; also
there seemed to be a continual roaring and thundering around her,
and such strange misty visions, that when she finally awoke, after a
long interval of deeper and sounder slumber, she was incapable of
separating the fact from the dream, more especially as head and
limbs were still heavy, weary, and battered. The strange roaring
still sounded, and sometimes seemed to shake the bed. Twilight was
coming in at a curtained window, and showed a tiny chamber, with
rafters overhead and thatch, a chest, a chair, and table. There was
a pallet on the floor, and Anne suspected that she had been wakened
by the rising of its occupant. Her watch was on the chair by her
side, but it had not been wound, and the dim light did not increase,
so that there was no guessing the time; and as the remembrance of
her dreadful adventures made themselves clear, she realised with
exceeding terror that she must be a prisoner, while the evening's
apparition relegated itself to the world of dreams.

Being kidnapped to be sent to the plantations was the dread of those
days. But if such were the case, what would become of Charles? In
the alarm of that thought she sat up in bed and prepared to rise,
but could nowhere see her clothes, only the little cloth bag of
toilet necessaries that she had taken with her.

At that moment, however, the woman came in with a