For an instant she seemed to struggle to regain her breath.
"Oh, how terrible! I can scarcely realize that all you have told me can be fact.

It sounds incredible, monstrous.

Why, it is as if we lived in a wild land, and another century.

No novelist could conceive of such a horrible condition.

There were pirates along this coast once--I have read of them--but now, in our age of the world, to even dream of such a state of affairs would be madness.