“Abel,” he answered, in the same voice. “Abel, the direct consignee of the secret, which was sealed by Carolus Victor, and never opened or delivered till it came to light in our parlour. Abel, who knew this coast, had written guide-books, about it--misleading guide-books, indeed, to me in my killing search--and who was aware that the place, the actual _caché_ of the treasure, still survived--or why should he have sought to hide the truth from me, and have fled in the night, himself like a thief? Abel, the cursed shadow that I follow, and cannot run to earth!” “O, Dick, tell him!” cried Harry once more. “Mr. Pilbrow!” I broke out, trembling with excitement. “I believe you have hunted counter; I believe we can show you where your shadow lies. It is in the hill under the abbey ruins, and you must take off your curse from it.” CHAPTER XII. RESCUE. Confession, discussion, incredulity, conviction, with all their concomitants of amazement, awe, emotion, were long over; long put aside in reservation was the unsolvable problem of Rampick’s part in the dark mystery of the hill; long had our last exhausted consideration of these questions lapsed into something like a silence of despair, as we drifted, with gentle lap and wallow, over those immeasurable heart-breaking wastes. At least with Harry and me, I think, hope had attenuated almost to the vanishing point. Brain-sodden, benumbed, half lifeless, grown near unconscious of time or place, the instinct to hold on, the power to keep at bay the last fatal drowsiness alone remained to us in ever-diminishing degree. We did not know, in the confusion of our senses, whether we were drawing inshore or to sea; we did not know whether we were rocking, an idle log, virtually unprogressive, or slipped into one of the coast currents, and speeding silent on an interminable journey. We could not tell the sick drawl of the hours, for our watches had, of course, stopped. But we dreaded horribly the time when dusk should fall, if it should find us derelicts still. And so it found us, drooping down and closing in; and then Providence seemed hidden, and we despaired. I cannot picture, indeed, the terror of that darkening desolation; the running fields of water, spectral with foam, fenced within an ever-contracting cyclone of dusk, devouring their own boundaries, and committing us slowly to entombment in one final sepulchre of night. It is all an impossible dream, in my mind--a sort of horrible pantomime, in which a sense of induration, of fixity, while I watched grotesque figures, born of my imagination, come and go in my brain, was ineffably dissolved by the spirit of the moon, and changed into consciousness of heaven.