www.freeclassicebooks.com

"Are you here?" whispered a childlike voice.

It was Mary! She had returned. The thongs no longer hurt me. The pangs of

hunger and thirst disappeared. I realized that it had been loneliness from which I

suffered most.

Mary!" I exclaimed. "You are a good girl. You have come back, after all. I had

commenced to think that you would not. Did you give my message to the queen?

Will she come? Where is she?"

The child's sobs increased, and she flung herself upon the dirt floor of the hut,

apparently overcome by grief.

What is it?" I asked. "Why do you cry?"

The queen, my mother, will not come to you," she said, between sobs. "She is

dead. Buckingham has killed her. Now he will take Victory, for Victory is queen.

He kept us fastened up in our shelter, for fear that Victory would escape him, but

I dug a hole beneath the back wall and got out. I came to you, because you saved

Victory once before, and I thought that you might save her again, and me, also.

Tell me that you will."

I am bound and helpless, Mary," I replied. "Otherwise I would do what I could to

save you and your sister."

I will set you free!" cried the girl, creeping up to my side. "I will set you free, and

then you may come and slay Buckingham."

Gladly!" I assented.

We must hurry," she went on, as she fumbled with the hard knots in the

stiffened rawhide, "for Buckingham will be after you soon. He must make an

offering to the lions at dawn before he can take Victory. The taking of a queen

requires a human offering!"

"And I am to be the offering?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, tugging at a knot. "Buckingham has been wanting a sacrifice

ever since he killed Wettin, that he might slay my mother and take Victory."

The thought was horrible, not solely because of the hideous fate to which I was

condemned, but from the contemplation it engendered of the sad decadence of a

once enlightened race. To these depths of ignorance, brutality, and superstition

had the vaunted civilization of twentieth century England been plunged, and by

what? War! I felt the structure of our time-honored militaristic arguments

crumbling about me.

The Lost Continent