“Take this; you will be better.”  A glass was at her lips, and she swallowed some hot drink, which revived her so that she opened 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 steaming cup of chocolate in her hand and some of the garments over her arm.  She was a stout, weather-beaten, kindly-looking woman with a high white cap, gold earrings, black short petticoat, and many-coloured apron.  “Monsieur veut savoir si mademoiselle va bien?” said she in slow careful French, and when questions in that language were eagerly poured