"Come this way," I said, after a few minutes' reflection, and directing my steps toward the old ruined fort by the shore, built, I suppose, as a defense to the abbey against pirates. There was but one flight of steps to the summit, and no mode of egress save by the entrance from whence they led. "I will relieve you of these cords while your mother is with you. Go up to the top of the fort. You will be unobserved, and we can watch here against any foolish attempt at escape." Ten minutes had not elapsed when the mother, accompanied by Johnson, and sobbing convulsively, appeared. Roberts hailed her, and after a brief explanation, she ascended the steps with tottering but hasty feet, to embrace her son. A quarter of an hour, she had been told, would be allowed for the interview. The allotted time had passed, and I was getting impatient, when a cry from the summit of the fort or tower, as if for help to some one at a distance, roused and startled us. As we stepped out of the gateway, and looked upward to ascertain the meaning of the sudden cry, the lad darted out and sped off with surprising speed. One of the men instantly snatched a pistol from his waist-belt, but at a gesture from me put it back. "He can not escape," I said. "Follow me, but use no unnecessary violence." Finding that we gained rapidly upon him, the lad darted through a low, narrow gateway, into the interior of the abbey ruins, trusting, I imagined, to baffle us in the darkness and intricacy of the place. I just caught sight of him as he disappeared up a long flight of crumbling, winding steps, from which he issued through a narrow aperture upon a lofty wall, some five or six feet wide, and overgrown with grass and weeds. I followed in terrible anxiety, for I feared that in his desperation he would spring off and destroy himself. I shouted loudly to him for God's sake to stop. He did so within a few feet of the end of the wall. I ran quickly toward him, and as I neared him he fell on his knees, threw away his hat, and revealed the face of--Ellen Dible! I stopped, bewildered, dizzy, paralyzed. Doubtless the mellowing radiance of the night softened or concealed the ravages which time must have imprinted on her features; for as I gazed upon the spirit-beauty of her upturned, beseeching countenance, the old time came back upon me with a power and intensity which an hour before I could not have believed possible. The men hailed repeatedly from below, but I was too bewildered, too excited, to answer: their shouts, and the young mother's supplicating sobs--she seemed scarcely older than when I parted from her--sounded in my ears like the far-off cries and murmurs of a bewildering, chaotic dream. She must have gathered hope and confidence from the emotion I doubtless exhibited, for as soon as the confusion and ringing in my brain had partially subsided, I could hear her say: "You will save my boy--my only son: for my sake, you will save him?"