But, if he thought of it, he did not attempt to do it.
She heard him sigh. Then she knew that he had straightened up and drawn away from her. It seemed to her that he stood there a long time, watching her, before he made a move to go away; but at last he did so.
Her sense of hearing was so acute that she could almost hear him as he breathed. She knew when he began to move away from her, and she could feel the increasing distance between them, as he went nearer to the door by which they had entered.
Then she heard the clicking of the latch, and she permitted the lids of her eyes to rise ever so little—just enough so that she could see through her drooping lashes the figure of the pirate chieftain standing on the threshold.
The mask still covered his face; evidently he had forgotten it. He was looking back upon her with an expression she could not fathom, for the reason that she could not see through the mask; but his attitude was kindly, if one can see kindness in the mere figure of a person.
Then he went out and closed the door softly behind him. For one, two, three, four, five seconds of time Bessie did not move. She counted them in order that she might make no mistake; and she waited that length of time lest the man might repent of his hasty departure and decide to return.
Then, at the end of the five seconds, she raised the revolver from under the folds of her dress and leveled it at the closed door.
She maintained that position while she counted ten more, and if the rover had opened the door during that time she would have shot him. She did not know that, when arrayed in the costume he was then wearing, he wore a steel breastplate under his shirt which would have turned her bullet just as it turned Kane’s, earlier in the evening.
But now fifteen seconds had elapsed since the pirate left her. A full quarter of a minute, and she leaped to her feet and darted toward the door. There was no ordinary lock upon it, but there was a chain-bolt, and this she at once slipped into place.
That done, she breathed a sigh of relief; and then, with an added shiver, she looked hastily around to discover if there were other means of entrance to the palatial cabin in which she was now a prisoner.