How far away in the past seemed those events! And as to my mother's anger against Winifred, that anger and cruel scorn of class which had concerned me so much, how insignificant now seemed this and every other obstacle in love's path! I looked up at the moonlit sky; I leaned upon a gate and looked across the silent fields where Winifred and I used to gather violets in spring, hedge-roses in summer, mushrooms in autumn, and I said, 'I will marry her; she shall be mine; she shall be mine, though all the powers on earth, all the powers in the universe, should say nay.'

As I spoke I saw that lights were flashing to and fro in the windows of the Hall. 'My poor father is dead,' I said. I turned and ran up the road. 'Oh, that I could have seen him once again!' At the hall door I was met by a servant, and learnt that, while I had been love-making on the sands, a message had come from the Continent with news of my father's death.



VI

There was no meeting Winifred on the next night.

It was decided that my uncle's private secretary should go to Switzerland to bring the body to England. I (remembering my promise about the mementos) insisted on accompanying him. We started on the morrow, preceded by a message to my father's Swiss friends ordering an embalmment. Before starting I tried to see Winifred; but she had gone to Dullingham.

On our arrival at the little Swiss town, we found that the embalmment had been begun. The body was still in the hands of a famous embalmer—an Italian Jew settled at Geneva, the only successful rival there of Professor Laskowski. He was celebrated for having revived the old Hebraic method of embalmment in spices, and improving it by the aid of the modern discoveries in antiseptics of Laskowski, Signer Franchina of Naples, and Dr. Dupre of Paris. This physician told me that by his process the body would, without the peculiarly-sealed coffin used by the Swiss embalmers, last 'firm and white as Carrara marble for a thousand years.'

The people at the chalet had naturally been much astonished to find upon my father's breast a jewelled cross lying. As soon as I entered the house they handed it to me.

For some reason or another this amulet and the curse had haunted my imagination as much as if I believed in amulets and curses, though my reason told me that everything of the kind was sheer nonsense. I could not sleep for thinking about it, and in the night I rose from my bed, and, opening the window, held up the cross in the moonlight. The facets caught the silvery rays and focussed them. The amulet seemed to shudder with some prophecy of woe. It was now that, for the first time, I began to feel the signs of that great struggle between reason and the inherited instinct of superstition which afterwards played so important a part in my life. I then took up the parchment scroll, and opened it and re-read the curse. The great letters in which the English version was printed seemed to me larger by the light of the moon than they had seemed by daylight.

We had to wait for some time in Switzerland. In a locked drawer I found the casket and a copy of The Veiled Queen. I read much in the book. Every word I found there was in flat contradiction to my own mode of thought.

Did the shock of this dreadful catastrophe drive Winifred from my mind? No, nothing could have done that. My soul seemed, as I have said, to be new-born, and all emotions, passions, and sentiments that were not connected with her seemed to be shadowy and distant, like ante-natal dreams. It would be hypocrisy not to confess this frankly, regardless of the impression against me it may make on the reader's mind. Yet I had a real affection for my father. In spite of his extraordinary obliviousness of my very existence till the last year of his life, I was strongly attached to him, and his death made me see nothing but his virtues; yet my soul was so filled with my passion for Winifred as to have but little room for sorrow. As to my mother, her attachment to my father knew no bounds, and her grief at her bereavement knew none.

A day or two before the funeral my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley arrived, and his presence was a great comfort to her. Owing to my father's position in the county a great deal of funereal state was considered necessary, and there was much hurry and bustle.

My uncle having known Wynne when quite a young man, before intemperance had degraded him, took an interest in him still. He had called at the cottage as he passed along Wilderness Road towards Raxton, and the result of this was that the organist came to speak to him at our house upon some matter in connection with the funeral service. My mother was greatly vexed at this. Her conduct on the occasion alarmed me. Ever since Frank's death had made it evident not only that I should succeed to all the property of my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley, but that I might even succeed to something greater, to the earldom which was the glory and pride of the Aylwins, my mother had kept a jealous and watchful eye upon me, being, as I afterwards learned, not unmindful of the early child-loves of Winifred and myself; and the advent to Raxton of Winifred, as a beautiful tall girl, had aroused her fears as well as her wrath.

The day of the funeral came, and the question of the casket and the amulet was on my mind. The important thing, of course, was that the matter should be kept absolutely secret. The valuables must be placed in secrecy with the embalmed corpse at the last moment, before the screwing down of the coffin, when servants and undertakers were out of sight and hearing.

My mother knew what had been my father's instructions to me, and was desirous that they should be fulfilled, though she scorned the superstition. She and I placed the casket and the scroll hearing the written curse upon it beneath my father's head, and hung the chain of the amulet around his neck, so that the cross lay with the jewels uppermost upon his breast. Then the undertakers were called in to screw down the coffin in my presence. My mother afterwards called me to her room, and told me that she was much troubled about the cross. The amulet being of great value, my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley had tried to dissuade her from carrying into execution what he called 'the absurd whim of a mystic'; but my mother urged my promise, and there had been warm words between them, as my mother told me—adding, however, 'and the worst of it is, that scamp Wynne, whom your uncle introduced into this house without my knowledge or sanction, was passing the door while your uncle was talking, and if he did not hear every word about the jewelled cross, drink must have stupefied him indeed. He is my only fear in connection with the jewels.' Her dislike of Wynne had made her forget for the moment the effect her words must have upon me.

'Mother,' I said, 'your persistent prejudice and injustice towards this man astonish me. Wynne, though poor and degraded now, is a gentleman born, and is no more likely to violate a tomb than the best Aylwin that ever lived.'

I will not dwell upon the scene at the funeral. I saw my father's coffin placed in the crypt that spread beneath the deserted church. It was by the earnest wish of my father that he was buried in a church already deserted because the grip of the resistless sea was upon it. At this very time a very large slice of the cliff behind the church was pronounced dangerous, and I perceived that new rails were lying on the grass ready to be fixed up, further inland than ever.



VII

My mother retired to her room immediately on our return to the house. My uncle stayed till just before dinner, and then left. I seemed to be alone in a deserted house, so still were the servants, so quiet seemed everything. But now what was this sense of undefined dread that came upon me and would not let me rest? Why did I move from room to room? and what was goading me? Something was stirring like a blind creature across my brain, and it was too hideous to confront. Why should I confront it? Why scare one's soul and lacerate one's heart at every dark fear that peeps through the door of imagination, when experience teaches us that out of every hundred such dark fears ninety-nine are sure to turn out mere magic-lantern bogies?

The evening wore on, and yet I would not face this phantom fear, though it refused to quit me.

The servants went to bed quite early that night, and when the butler came to ask me if I should 'want anything more,' I said 'only a candle,' and went up to my bedroom.

'I will turn into bed,' I said, 'and sleep over it. The idea is a figment of an over-wrought brain. Destiny would never play any man a trick like that which I have dared to dream of. Among human calamities it would be at once the most shocking and the most whimsical—this imaginary woe that scares me. Destiny is merciless, but who ever heard of Destiny playing mere cruel practical jokes upon man? Up to now the Fates have never set up as humorists. Now, for a man to love, to dote upon, a girl whose father is the violator of his own father's tomb—a wretch who has called down upon himself the most terrible curse of a dead man that has ever been uttered—that would be a fate too fantastically cruel to be permitted by Heaven—by any governing power whose sanctions were not those of a whimsical cruelty.'

Yet those words of my mother's about Wynne, and her suspicions of him, were flitting about the air of the room like fiery-eyed bats.

The air of the room—ah! it was stifling me. I opened the window and leant out. But that made matters a thousand times worse, for the moon was now at the very full, and staring across—staring at what?—staring across the sea at the tall tower of the old church on the cliff, where perhaps the sin—the 'unpardonable sin,' according to Cymric ideas—of sacrilege—sacrilege committed by her father upon the grave of mine—might at this moment be going on. The body of the church was hidden from me by the intervening trees, and nothing but the tall tower shone in the silver light. So intently did the moon stare at it, that it seemed to me that the inside of the church, with its silent aisles, arches, and tombs, was reflected on her disc. The moon oppressed me, and when I turned my eyes away I seemed to see hanging in the air the silent aisles of a church, through whose windows the moonlight was pouring, flooding them with a radiance more ghastly than darkness, concentrating all its light on the chancel, beneath which I knew that my father was lying in the dark crypt with a cross on his breast. I turned for relief to look in the room, and there, in the darkness made by the shadow of the bed, I seemed to read, written in pale, trembling flame, the words:

'LET THERE BE NO MAN TO PITY HIM, NOR TO HAVE COMPASSION UPON HIS FATHERLESS CHILDREN....LET HIS CHILDREN BE VAGABONDS, AND BEG THEIR BREAD: LET THEM SEEK IT ALSO OUT OF DESOLATE PLACES.'

I returned to the window for relief from the bedroom.

'Now, let me calmly consider the case in all its bearings, I said to myself, drawing a chair to the window and sitting down with my elbows resting on the sill. 'Suppose Wynne really did overhear the altercation between my mother and my uncle, which seems scarcely probable, has drink really so demoralised him, so brutalised him, that for drink he would commit the crime of sacrilege? There are no signs of his having sunk so low as that. But suppose the crime were committed, what then? Do I really believe that the curse of my father and of the Psalmist would fall upon Winifred's pure and innocent head? Certainly not. I do not believe in the effect of curses at all. I do not belief in any supernatural interference with the natural laws of the universe.'

Ah! but this thought about the futility of the curse, about the folly of my father's superstitions, brought me no comfort. I knew that, brave as Winifred was as a child, she was, when confronting the material world, very superstitious. I remembered that as a child, whenever I said, 'What a happy day it has been!' she would not rest until she had made me add, 'and shall have many more,' because of her feeling of the prophetic power of words. I knew that the superstitions of the Welsh hills awed her. I knew that it had been her lot to imbibe, not only Celtic, but Romany superstitions. I knew that the tribe of Gypsies with whom she had been thrown into contact, the Lovells and the Boswells, though superior to the rest, of the Romany race, are the most superstitious of all, and that Winifred had become an object of strong affection to the most superstitious even among that tribe, one Sinfi Lovell. I knew from something that had once fallen from her as a child on the sands, when prattling about Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell, that especially powerful with her was the idea (both Romany and Celtic) about the effect of a dead man's curse. I knew that this idea had a dreadful fascination for her—the fascination of repulsion. I knew also that reason may strive with superstition as with the other instincts, but it will strive in vain. I knew that it would have been worse than idle for me to say to Winifred, 'There is no curse in the matter. The dreaming mystic who begot and forgot me, what curse could he call down on a soul like my Winifred's?' Her reason might partly accept my arguments; but straightway they would be spurned by her instincts and her traditional habits of thought. The terrible voice of the Psalmist would hush every other sound. Her sweet soul would pine under the blazing fire of a curse, real or imaginary; her life would be henceforth but a bitter penance. Like the girl in Coleridge's poem of 'The Three Graves,' her very flesh would waste before the fires of her imagination. 'No,' said I, 'such a calamity as this which I dread Heaven would not permit. So cruel a joke as this Hell itself would not have the heart to play.'

My meditations were interrupted by a sound, and then by a sensation such as I cannot describe. Whence came that shriek? It was like a coming from a distance—loud there, faint here, and yet it seemed to come from me! It was as though I were witnessing some dreadful sight unutterable and intolerable. And then it seemed the voice of Winifred, and then it seemed her father's voice, and finally it seemed the voice of my own father struggling in his tomb. My horror stopped the pulses of my heart for a moment, and then it passed.

'It comes from the church or from behind the church,' I said, as the shriek was followed by an angry murmur as of muffled thunder. All had occurred within the space of half a second. I quickly but cautiously opened my bedroom door, extinguishing my light before doing so, and began to creep downstairs, fearing to wake my mother. My shoes creaked, so I took them off and carried them. Crossing the hall, I softly drew the bolts of the front door; then I passed into the moonlight. The gravel of the carriage-drive cut through my stockings, and a pebble bruised one of my heels so that I nearly fell. When I got safely under the shadow of the large cedar of Lebanon in the middle of the lawn, I stopped and looked up at my mother's window to see if she were a watcher. The blinds were down, there was no movement, no noise. Evidently she was asleep. I put on my shoes and hurried across the lawn towards the high road. I walked at a sharp pace towards the old church. The bark of a distant dog or the baa of a waking sheep was the only sound. When I reached the churchyard, I peered in dread over the lich-gate before I opened it. Neither Wynne nor any living creature was to be seen in the churchyard.

The soothing smell of the sea came from the cliffs, making me wonder at my fears. On the loneliest coast, in the dunnest night, a sense of companionship comes with the smell of seaweed. At my feet spread the great churchyard, with its hundreds of little green hillocks and white gravestones, sprinkled here and there with square, box-like tombs. All quietly asleep in the moonlight! Here and there an aged headstone seemed to nod to its neighbour, as though muttering in its dreams. The old church, bathed in the radiance, seemed larger than it had ever done in daylight, and incomparably more grand and lonely.

On the left were the tall poplar trees, rustling and whispering among themselves. Still, there might be at the back of the church mischief working. I walked round thither. The ghostly shadows on the long grass might have been shadows thrown by the ruins of Tadmor, so quietly did they lie and dream. A weight was uplifted from my soul. A balm of sweet peace fell upon my heart. The noises I had heard had been imaginary, conjured up by love and fear; or they might have been an echo of distant thunder. The windows of the church no doubt looked ghastly, as I peered in to see whether Wynne's lantern was moving about. But all was still. I lingered in the churchyard close by the spot where I had first seen the child Winifred and heard the Welsh song.

I went to look at the sea from the cliff. Here, however, there was something sensational at last. The spot where years ago I had sat when Winifred's song had struck upon my ear and awoke me to a new life—was gone! 'This then was the noise I heard,' I said; 'the rumbling was the falling of the earth; the shriek was the tearing down of trees.'

Another slice, a slice weighing thousands of tons, had slipped since the afternoon from the churchyard on to the sands below. 'Perhaps the tread of the townspeople who came to witness the funeral may have given the last shake to the soil,' I said.

I stood and looked over the newly-made gap at the great hungry water. Considering the little wind, the swell on the North Sea was tremendous. Far away there had been a storm somewhere. The moon was laying a band of living light across the vast bosom of the sea, like a girdle. Only a month had elapsed since that never-to-be-forgotten moonlight walk with Winifred. But what a world of emotion since then!



VIII

I walked along the cliff to the gangway behind Flinty Point, and descended in order to see what havoc the landslip had made with the graves.

I looked across the same moonlit sands where I had seen Winifred so short a time before, when I had a father. To my delight and surprise, there she was again. There was Winifred, walking thoughtfully towards Church Cove with Snap by her side, who seemed equally thoughtful and sedate. The relief of finding that my fears about her father were groundless added to my joy at seeing her. With my own dead father lying within a few roods of me, I ran towards her in a state of high exhilaration, forgetting everything but her. With sympathetic looks for my bereavement she met me, and we walked hand-in-hand in silence.

After a little while she said: 'My father told me he was very busy to-night, and wished me to come on the sands for a walk, but I little hoped to meet you; I am very pleased we have met, for to-morrow I am going to London.'

'To London?' I said, in dismay at the thought of losing her so soon. 'Why are you going to London. Winnie?'

'Oh,' said she, with the same innocent look of business-like importance which, at our first meeting as children, had so impressed me when she pulled out the key to open the church door, 'I'm going on business.'

'On business! And how long do you stay?'

'I don't stay at all; I'm coming back immediately.'

'Come,' I exclaimed, 'there's a little comfort in that, at least. Snap and I can wait for one day.'

'Good-night,' said Winifred.

'Have you not seen the great landslip at the churchyard?' I asked, taking her hand and pointing to the new promontory which the debris of the fall had made.

'Another landslip?' said she. 'Poor dear old churchyard, it will soon all be gone! Snap and I must have been far away when that fell. But I remember saying to him, 'Hark at the thunder. Snap!' and then I heard a sound like a shriek that appalled me. It recalled a sound I once heard in Shire-Carnarvon.'

'What was it, Winnie?'

'You've heard me when I was a little girl talk of my Gypsy sister Sinfi?'

'Often,' I said.

'She loves me more than anybody else in the whole world,' said Winifred simply. 'She says she would lay down her life for me, and I really believe she would. Well, there is not far from where I used to live a famous cascade called the Swallow Falls, where the water drops down a chasm of great depth. If you listen to the noise of the cataract, you may hear mingled with it a peculiar kind of wail as from a man in great agony. It is said to be the wail of a Sir John Wynn, of Gwydir, whose spirit is under a curse, and is imprisoned at the bottom of the falls on account of his cruelty and misdeeds on earth. On those rare nights when the full moon shines down the chasm, the wail becomes an agonised shriek. Once on a bright moonlight night Sinfi and I went to see these falls. The moonlight on the cascade had exactly the same supernatural appearance that it has now falling upon these billows. Sinfi sings some of our Welsh songs, and accompanies herself on a peculiar obsolete Welsh instrument called a crwth, which she always carries with her. While we were listening to the cataract and what she called the Wynn wail, she began to sing the wild old air. Then at once the wail sprang into a loud shriek; Sinfi said the shriek of a cursed spirit; and the shriek was exactly like the sound I heard from the cliffs a little while ago.'

'I heard the same noise, Winnie. It was simply the rending and cracking of the poor churchyard trees as they fell.'

She turned back with me to the water-mark to see the waves come tumbling in beneath the moon. We sauntered along the sea-margin again, heedless of the passage of time.

And again (as on that betrothal night) Winifred prattled on, while I listened to the prattle, craftily throwing in a word or two, now and then, to direct the course of the sweet music into such channels as best pleased my lordly whim,—when suddenly, against my will and reason, there came into my mind that idea of the sea's prophecy which was so familiar to my childhood, but which my studies had now made me despise.

The sea then threw up to Winifred's feet a piece of seaweed. It was a long band of common weed, that would in the sunlight have shone a bright red. And at that very moment—right across the sparkling bar the moon had laid over the sea—there passed, without any cloud to cast it, a shadow. And my father's description of his love-tragedy haunted me, I knew not why. And right across my life, dividing it in twain like a burn-scar, came and lay for ever that strip of red seaweed. Why did my father's description of his own love-tragedy haunt me?

Before recalling the words that had fallen from my father in Switzerland, I was a boy: in a few minutes afterwards, I was a man with an awful knowledge of Destiny in my eyes—a man struggling with calamity, and fainting in the grip of dread. My manhood, I say, dates from the throwing up of that strip of seaweed. Winifred picked up the weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.

'Isn't it a lovely colour?' she said, as it glistened in the moonlight. 'Isn't it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?'

'It is as red as the reddest ruby,' I replied, putting out my hand and grasping the slippery substance.

'Would you believe,' said Winnie, 'that I never saw a ruby in my life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.'

'Why do you want particularly to know?'

'Because,' said Winifred, 'my father, when he wished me to come out for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.'

'Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred—how very odd!'

'Yes,' said Winifred, 'and he talked about diamonds too.'

'THE CURSE!' I murmured, and clasped her to my breast. 'Kiss me, Winifred!'

There had come a bite of sudden fire at my heart, and I shuddered with a dreadful knowledge, like the captain of an unarmed ship, who, while the unconscious landsmen on board are gaily scrutinising a sail that like a speck has appeared on the horizon, shudders with the knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells, and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit. As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from Winifred's bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my hair began to stir.

At first she resisted my movement, but looking in my eyes and seeing that something had deeply disturbed me, she let me kiss her. 'What did you say, Henry?'

'That I love you so, Winnie, and cannot let you go just yet.'

'What a dear fellow it is!' she said; 'and all this ado about a poor girl with scarcely shoes to her feet.' Then, after an instant's pause, she said: 'But I thought you said something very different. I thought you said something about a curse, and that scared me.'

'Scared Winifred!' I said. 'Fancy anything scaring Winnie, who threatens to hit people when they offend her.'

'Ah! but I am scared,' said she, 'at things from the other world, and especially at a curse.'

'Why, what do you know about curses, Winifred?'

'Oh, a good deal. I have never forgotten that shriek of a cursed spirit which I heard at the Swallow Falls. And only a short time ago Sinfi Lovell nearly frightened me to death by a story of a whole Gypsy tribe having withered, one after the other—grandfathers, fathers, and children—through a dead man's curse. But what is the matter with you, Henry? You surely have turned very pale!'

'Well, Winnie,' said I, 'I am a little, just a little faint. After the funeral I could take no dinner. But it will he over in a minute. Let us go back a few yards and sit down upon the dry sand, and have a little more chat.'

We went and sat down, and my heart slowly resumed its function.

'Let me see, Winnie, what were we talking about? About rubies and diamonds, I think, were we not? You said that when your father bade you come out for a walk to-night, he had just been talking about rubies and diamonds. What was he saying about them, Winnie? But come and lay your head here while you tell me; lay it on my breast, Winnie, as you used to do in Graylingham Wood, and on these same sands.'

Evidently the earnestness of my manner and the suppressed passion in my voice drove out of her mind all her wise saws about the perils of wealth and all her wise determinations about the postponed betrothal, for she came and sat by my side and laid her head upon my breast.

'Yes. like that,' I said; 'and now tell me what your father was saying about precious stones; for I, too, take an interest in jewels, and have a great knowledge of them.'

'My father,' said Winifred, 'is going to have some diamonds and rubies given to him to-night by a friend of his, a sailor, who has come from India, and I am to go to London to-morrow to sell some of them; for you know, dear, we are very poor. That is why I am determined to go back to Shire-Carnarvon and see if I can get a situation as governess. Miss Dalrymple's recommendation will be of great aid. Poverty afflicts father more than it afflicts most people, and the rubies and diamonds and things will be of no use to us, you know.'

I could make her no answer.

'It seems a very strange kind of present from my father's friend,' she continued, meditatively; 'but it is a very kind one for all that. But, Henry, you surely are still very unwell; your heart is thumping underneath my ear like a fire-engine.'

'They are all love-thumps for Winifred,' I said, with pretended jocosity; 'they are all love-thumps for my Winnie.'

'But of course,' said she, 'this is quite a secret about the precious stones. My father enjoined me to tell no one, because the temptation to people is so great, and the cottage might be robbed, or I might be waylaid going to London. But of course I may tell you; he never thought of you.'

'No, Winnie, he never thought of me. You are very fond of him; very fond of your father, are you not?'

'Oh yes,' said she, 'I love him more than all the world—next to you.'

'Then he is kind to you, Winnie?' 'Ye—yes, as kind as he can be—considering—'

'Considering what, Winnie?'

'Considering that he's often—unwell, you know.'

'Winnie.' I said, as I gazed in the innocent eyes, 'whom are you considered to be the most like, your father or your mother?'

'I never knew my mother, but I am said to be partly like her. Why do you ask?'

'Only an idle question. You love me, Winnie?'

'What a question!'

'And you will do what I ask you to do, if I ask you very earnestly, Winnie?'

'Certumly,' said Winifred, giving, with a forced laugh, the lisp with which that word had been given on a now famous occasion.

'Well, Winifred, I told you that I feel an interest in precious stones, and have some knowledge of them. There are certain stones to which I have the greatest antipathy: diamonds and rubies are the chief of these.

Now I want you to promise that diamonds and rubies and beryls shall never touch these fingers, these dear fingers, Winnie, which are mine, you know; they are mine now,' and I drew the smooth nails slowly along my lips. 'You are mine now, every bit.'

'Every bit,' said Winifred, but she looked perplexed.

She saw, however, by my face that, for some reason or other, I was deeply in earnest. She gave the promise. And I knew at least that those fingers would not be polluted, come what would. As to her going to London with the spoil, I knew how to prevent that.

But what course of action was I now to take? At this very moment perhaps Winifred's father was violating my father's tomb, unless indeed the crime might even yet he prevented. There was one hope, however. The drunken scoundrel whose daughter was my world I knew to be a procrastinator in everything. His crime might, even yet, be only a crime in intent; and, if so, I could prevent it easily enough. My first business was to hurry to the church, and, if not yet too late, keep guard over the tomb. But to achieve this I must get quit of Winifred without a moment's delay. Now Winifred's most direct path to the cottage was the path I myself must take to the church, the gangway behind Flinty Point. Yet she must not pass the church with me, lest an encounter with her father should take place. There was thus but one course open. I must induce her to take the gangway behind the other point of the cove; and how was this to be compassed? That was what I was racking my brain about.

'Winifred,' I said at last, as we sat and looked at the sea, 'I begin to fear we must be moving.'

She started up, vexed that the hint to move had come from me.

'The fact is,' I said, 'I particularly want to go into the old church.'

'Into the old church to-night?' said Winifred, with a look of astonishment and alarm that I could not understand.

'Yes; something was left undone there this afternoon at the funeral, and I must go at once. But why do you look so alarmed?'

'Oh, don't go into the old church to-night,' said Winifred.

I stood and looked at her, puzzled and strangely disturbed.

'Henry,' said she, 'I know you will think me very foolish, but I have not yet got over the fright that shriek gave me, the shriek we both heard the moment before the landslip. That shriek was not a noise made by the rending of trees, Henry. No, no; we both know better than that, Henry.'

I gave a start; for, try as I would, I had not really succeeded in persuading myself that what I had heard was anything but a human voice in terror or in pain.

'What do you think the noise was, then?' said I.

'I don't know; but I know what I felt as it came shuddering along the sand, and then went wailing over the sea.'

'What did you feel, Winnie?'

'My heart stood still, for it seemed to me to be the call from the grave.'

'The call from the grave! and pray what is that? I feel how sadly my education has been neglected.'

'Don't scoff, Henry. It is said that when the fate of an old family is at stake, there will sometimes come to him who represents it a call from the grave, and when I saw Snap standing stock still, his hair bristling with terror, I knew that it was no earthly shriek. I felt sure it was a call from the grave, and I knelt on the sands and prayed. Henry, Henry, don't go in the church to-night.'

That Winifred's words affected me profoundly I need not say. The shriek, whatever it was, had been responded to by her soul and by mine in the same mysterious way. But the important thing to do was to prevent her from imagining that her superstitious terrors had affected me.

'Really, Winnie,' I said, 'this double-voiced shriek of yours, which is at once the shriek of the Welshman at the bottom of the swollen falls and the Celtic call from the grave, is the most dramatic shriek I ever heard of. It would make its fortune on the stage. But with all its power of being the shriek of two different people at once, it must not prevent my going into the church to do my duty; so we had better part here at this very spot. You go up the cliffs by Needle Point, and I will take Flinty Point gangway.'

'But why not ascend the cliffs together?' said Winifred.

'Why, the prying coastguard might be passing, and might wonder to see us in the churchyard on the night of my father's funeral (he might take us for two ghosts in love, you know). However, we need not part just yet. We can walk on a little farther into the cove before our paths diverge.'

Winifred made no demur, though she looked puzzled, as we were then much nearer to the gangway I had selected for myself than to the gangway I had allotted to her.

IX

Winifred and I were in the little horseshoe curve called 'Church Cove,' but also called sometimes 'Mousetrap Cove,' because, as I have already mentioned, a person imprisoned in it by the tide could only escape by means of a boat from the sea.

Needle Point was at one extremity of the cove and Flinty Point at the other. In front of us, therefore, at the very centre of the cliff that surrounded the cove, was the old church, which I was to reach as soon as possible. To reach a gangway up the cliff it was necessary to pass quite out of the cove, round either Flinty Point or Needle Point; for the cliff within the cove was perpendicular, and in some parts actually overhanging.

When we reached the softer sands near the back of the cove, where the walking was difficult, I bade Winifred good-night, and she turned somewhat demurely to the left on her way to Needle Point, between which and the spot where we now parted she would have to pass below the church on the cliff, and close by the great masses of debris from the new landslip that had fallen from the churchyard. This landslip (which had taken place since she had left home for her moonlight walk) had changed the shape of the cove into a figure something like the Greek epsilon.

I walked rapidly towards Flinty Point, which I should have to double before I could reach the gangway I was to take. So feverishly possessed had I become by the desire to prevent the sacrilege, if possible, that I had walked some distance away from Winifred before I observed how high the returning tide had risen in the cove.

When I now looked at Flinty Point, round which I was to turn, I saw that it was already in deep water, and that I could not reach the gangway outside the cove. It was necessary, therefore, to turn back and ascend by the gangway Winifred was making for, behind Needle Point, which did not project so far into the sea. So I turned back. As I did so, I perceived that she had reached the projecting mass of debris in the middle of the semicircle below the churchyard, and was looking at it. Then I saw her stoop, pick up what seemed a paper parcel, open it, and hold it near her face to trace out the letters by the moonlight. Then I saw her give a start as she read it. I walked towards her, and soon reached the landslip. Evidently what she read agitated her much. She seemed to read it and re-read it. When she saw me she put it behind her back, trying to conceal it from me.

'What have you picked up, Winifred?' I said, in much alarm; for my heart told me that it was in some way connected with her father and the shriek.

'Oh, Henry!' said she, 'I was in hopes you had not seen it. I am so grieved for you. This parchment contains a curse written in large letters. Some sacrilegious wretch has broken into the church and stolen a cross placed in your father's tomb.'

God!—It was the very same parchment scroll from my father's tomb on which was written the curse! I was struck dumb with astonishment and dismay. The whole terrible truth of the situation broke in upon me at one flash. The mysterious shriek was explained now. Wynne had evidently broken open the tomb as soon as his daughter was out of the way. He had then, in order to reach the cottage without running the risk of being seen by a chance passenger on the Wilderness Road, blundered about the edge of the cliff at the very moment when it was giving way, and had fallen with it. It was his yell of despair amid the noise of the landslip that Winifred and I had both heard. My sole thought was for Winifred. She had read the curse; but where was the dead body of her father that would proclaim upon whose head the curse had fallen? I stared around me in dismay. She saw how deeply I was disturbed, but little dreamed the true cause.

'Oh, Henry,' said she, 'to think that you should have such a grief as this; your dear father's tomb violated!' and she sat down and sobbed. 'But there is a God in heaven,' she added, rising with great solemnity. 'Whoever has committed this dreadful crime against God and man will rue the day he was born:—the curse of a dead man who has been really wronged no penance or prayer can cure,—so my aunt in Wales used to say, and so Sinfi says;—it clings to the wrongdoer and to his children. That cry I heard was the voice of vengeance, and it came from your father's tomb.'

'It is a most infamous robbery,' I said; 'but as to the curse, that is of course as powerless to work mischief as the breath of a baby.' And again I anxiously looked around to see where was the dead body of Wynne, which I knew must be close by.

'Oh, Henry!' said she, 'listen to these words, these awful words of your dead father, and the words of the Bible too.'

And she held up to her eyes, as though fascinated by it, the parchment scroll, and read aloud in a voice so awe-struck that it did not seem to be her voice at all:

'He who shall violate this tomb,—he who shall steal this amulet, hallowed as a love-token between me and my dead wife,—he who shall dare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon this cross, stands cursed by God, cursed by love, and cursed by me, Philip Aylwin, lying here. "Let there be no man to pity him, nor to have compassion upon his fatherless children....Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread: let them seek it also out of desolate places."—Psalm cix. So saith the Lord. Amen.'

'I am in the toils,' I murmured, with grinding teeth.

'What a frightful curse!' she said, shuddering. 'It terrifies me to think of it. How hard it seems,' she continued, 'that the children should be cursed for the father's crimes.'

'But, Winifred, they are NOT so cursed,' I cried. 'It is all a hideous superstition: one of Man's idiotic lies!'

'Henry,' said she, shocked at my irreverence, 'it is so; the Bible says it, and all life shows it. Ah! I wonder what wretch committed the sacrilege, and why he had no pity on his poor innocent children!'

While she was talking, I stooped and picked up the casket from which the letters had been forced by the fall. She had not seen it. I put it in my pocket.

'Henry, I am so grieved for you,' said Winifred again, and she came and wound her fingers in mine.

Grieved for me! But where was her father's dead body? That was the thought that appalled me. Should we come upon it in the debris? What was to be done? Owing to the tide, there was no turning back now to Flinty Point. The projecting debris must be passed. There was no dallying for a moment. If we lingered we should be caught by the tide in Mousetrap Cove, and then nothing could save us. Suppose in passing the debris we should come upon her father's corpse. The idea was insupportable. 'Thank God, however, I murmured, 'she will not even then know the very worst; she will see the corpse of her father who has fallen with the cliff, but she need not and will not associate him with the sacrilege and the curse.'

As I picked up the letters that had been scattered from the casket, she said,

'I cannot get that dreadful curse out of my head; to think that the children of the despoiler should be cursed by God, and cursed by your father, and yet they are as innocent as I am.'

'Best to forget it,' said I, standing still, for I dared not move towards the debris.

'We must get on, Henry,' said she, 'for look, the tide is unusually high to-night. You have turned back, I see, because Flinty Point is already deep in the water.'

'Yes,' I said, 'I must turn Needle Point with you. But as to the sacrilege, let us dismiss it from our minds; what cannot be helped had better be forgotten.'

I then cautiously turned the corner of the debris, leading her after me in such a way that my body acted as a screen. Then my eyes encountered a spectacle whose horror chilled my blood, and haunts me to this day in my dreams. About twelve feet above the general level of the sand, buried to the breast behind a mass of green sward fallen from the graveyard, stood the dead body of Wynne, amid a confused heap of earth, gravestones, trees, shrubs, bones, and shattered coffins. Bolt upright it stood, staring with horribly distorted features, as in terror, the crown of the head smashed by a fallen gravestone. Upon his breast glittered the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross, sparkling in the light of the moon, and seeming to be endowed with conscious life. It was evident that he had, while groping his way out of the crypt, slung the cross around his neck, in order to free his hands. I shudder as I recall the spectacle. The sight would have struck Winifred dead, or sent her raving mad, on the spot; but she had not turned the corner, and I had just time to wheel sharply round, and thrust my body between her and the spectacle. The dog saw it, and, foaming with terror, pointed at it.

'I beg your pardon, Winifred,' I said, falling upon her and pushing her back.

Then I stood paralysed as the full sinister meaning of the situation broke in upon my mind. Had the debris fallen in any other way I might have saved Winifred from seeing the most cruel feature of the hideous spectacle, the cross, the evidence of her father's sacrilege. I might, perhaps, on some pretence, have left her on this side the debris, and turning the corner, have mounted the heap and removed the cross gleaming in hideous mockery on the dead man's breast, and giving back the moonbeams in a cross of angry fire. One glance, however, had shown me that before this could be done, there was a wall of slippery sward to climb, for the largest portion of the churchyard soil had broken off in one lump. In falling, it had turned but half over, and then had slid down sideways, presenting to the climber a facet or sward nearly perpendicular and a dozen feet high. Wedged in between the jaggy top of this block and the wall of the cliff was the corpse, showing that Wynne had been standing by the fissure of the cliff at the moment when it widened into a landslip.

Nor was that all; between that part of the debris where the corpse was perched and the sand below was one of those long pools of sea-water edged by shingles, which are common features of that coast. It seemed that Destiny or Circumstance, more pitiless than Fate and Hell, determined on our ruin, had forgotten nothing.

The contour of the cove; the way in which the debris had been thrown across the path we now must follow in order to reach the only place of egress; the way in which the hideous spectacle of Wynne and the proof of his guilt had been placed, so that to pass it without seeing it the passenger must go blindfold; the brilliance of the moon, intensified by being reflected from the sea; the fulness of the high tide, and the swell—all was complete! As I stood there with clenched teeth, like a rat in a trap, a wind seemed to come blowing through my soul, freezing and burning. I cursed Superstition that was slaying us both. And I should have cursed Heaven but for the touch of Winnie's clasping fingers, silky and soft as when I first felt them as a child in the churchyard.

'What has happened?' asked she, looking into my face.

'Only a slip of my foot,' I said, recovering my presence of mind.

'But why do you turn back?'

'I cannot bring myself to part from you under this delicious moon, Winnie, if you will stay a few minutes longer. Let us go and sit on that very boulder where little Hal proposed to you.'

'But you want to go into the church,' said Winifred, as we moved back towards the boulder.

'No, I will leave that till the morning. I would leave anything till the morning, to have a few minutes longer with you on the sands. Try to imagine that we are children again, and that I am not the despised rich man but little Hal the cripple.'

Winifred's eyes, which had begun to look very troubled, sparkled with delight.

'But,' said she with a sigh, as we sat down on the boulder, 'I'm afraid we sha'n't be able to stay long. See how the tide is rising, and the sea is wild. The tides just now, father says, come right up to the cliff in the cove, and once locked in between Flinty Point and Needle Point there is no escape.'

'Yes, darling,' I muttered to myself, drawing her to me and burying my face in her bosom, 'there is one escape, only one.'

For death seemed to me the only escape from a tragedy far, far worse than death.

If she made me any answer I heard it not; for, as I sat there with closed eyes, schemes of escape fluttered before me and were dismissed at the rate of a thousand a second. A fiery photograph of the cove was burning within my brain, my mind was absorbed in examining every cranny and every protuberance in the semicircular wall of the cliff there depicted; over and over again I was examining that brain-picture, though I knew every inch of it, and knew there was not in the cliff-wall foothold for a squirrel.

X

The moon mocked me, and seemed to say:

'The blasting spectacle shining there on the other side of that heap of earth must be passed, or Needle Point can never be reached; and unless it is reached instantly you and she can never leave the cove.'

'Then we will never leave it,' I whispered to myself, jumping up.

As I did so I found for the first time that her forehead had been resting against my head; for the furious rate at which the wheels of thought were moving left no vital current for the sense of touch, and my flesh was numbed.

'Something has happened,' she said. 'And why did you keep whispering "yes, yes"? Whom were you whispering to?'

The truth was that, in that dreadful trance, my conscience had been saying to me, 'Have you a right to exercise your power over this girl by leading her like a lamb to death?' and my love had replied, 'Yes, ten thousand times yes.'

'Winifred,' I said, 'I would die for you.'

'Yes, Henry,' said she, 'I know it; but what have we to do with death now?'

'To save you from harm this flesh of mine would rejoice at crucifixion; to save you from death this soul and body of mine would rejoice to endure a thousand years of hell-fire.'

She turned pale, amazed at the delirium into which I had passed.

'To save you from harm, dear, I would,' said I, with a quiet fierceness that scared her, 'immolate the whole human race—mothers, and fathers, and children; I would make a hecatomb of them all to save this body of yours, this sweet body, alive.'

But I could not proceed. What I had meant to say was this,—

'And yet, Winnie, I have brought you here to this boulder to die!'

But I could not say it—my tongue rebelled and would not say it.

Winifred was so full of health and enjoyment of life that, courageous as she was. I felt that the prospect of certain and imminent death must appal her; and to see the look of terror break over her face confronting death was what I could not bear. And yet the thing must be said. But at this very moment, when my perplexity seemed direst, a blessed thought came to me—a subterfuge holier than truth. I knew the Cymric superstition about 'the call from the grave,' for had not she herself just told me of it?

'I will turn Superstition, accursed Superstition itself, to account,' I muttered. 'I will pretend that I am enmeshed in a web of Fate, and doomed to die here myself. Then, if I know my Winifred, she will, of her own free mind, die with me.'

'Winnie,' I said, 'I have to tell you something that I know must distress you sorely on my account—something that must wring your heart, dear, and yet it must be told.'

She turned her head sharply round with a look of alarm that almost silenced me, so pathetic was it. On that courageous face I had not seen alarm before, and this was alarm for evil coming to me. It shook my heart—it shook my heart so that I could not speak.

'I felt,' said she, 'that something awful had happened. And it affects yourself, Henry?'

'It affects myself.'

'And very deeply?'

'Very deeply, Winnie.'

Then, pulling from my pocket the silver casket and the parchment scroll, I said, 'It has relation to these.'

'That I felt,' said she; 'how could it be otherwise? Oh, the miscreant! I curse him; I curse him!'

'Winifred,' I said, 'between me and this casket, and the cross mentioned in this scroll, there is a mysterious link. The cross is an amulet, an heirloom of dreadful potency for good and ill. It has been disturbed; it has been stolen from my father's grave, and there is but one way of setting right that disturbance. To avert unspeakable calamity from falling upon two entire families (the family of Aylwin and that of her to whom this amulet was given) a sacrifice is demanded.'

'Henry, you terrify me to death. What is the sacrifice? Oh God! Oh God!'

'My father's son must die, Winnie.'

She turned ashen pale, but struggling to be playful, she said, 'I fear that the family of Aylwin and the family of somebody else must even take the calamity and bear it; for I don't mean my Henry to die, let me assure both families of that.'

'Ah! but, Winnie, I am under a solemn oath and pledge to bear this penalty; and we part to-night, That shriek which so appalled you—'

'Well, well, the shriek?' said she, in a frenzy of impatience.

I made no answer, but she answered herself.

'That shriek was a call to you,' she cried, and then burst into a passion of tears. 'It cannot be,' she said. 'It cannot and shall not be; God is too good to suffer it,' Then she fixed her eyes upon me, and sobbed: 'Ah, it is true! I feel it is all true! Yes, they are calling you, and that is why my soul answered the call. Ah, when I saw you just now lift your head from my breast with a face grey and wizened as an old man's—when I saw you look at me, I knew that something dreadful had happened. Oh, I knew, I knew! but I thought it had happened to me. The love and pity in your eyes when you opened them upon me made me think it was my trouble, and not yours, that disturbed you. And now I know it is yours, and you are going to die! They are calling you. Yes, you are going to let the tide drown you! Oh, my love my love!' and her grief was so acute that I knew not at first whether in this I had done well after all.

'Winifred,' I said, 'you must bear this. I have always been ready to take death when it should come. I have at least had one blessed time with Winifred on the sands—Winifred the beloved and beautiful girl—one night, as the crown to the happy days that have been mine with Winifred the beloved and beautiful child. And that night, as we were walking by the sea, it seemed to me that such happiness as was ours can come but once—that never again could there be a night equal to that.'

Smiles broke through her tears as she listened to me. I had struck the right chord.

'And I thought so too,' she said. 'It was indeed a night of bliss. Indeed, indeed God has been good to us, Henry,' and she fell into my arms again.

'And now, Winnie,' I said, 'we must kiss and part—part for ever.'

Yes, I had struck the right chord. As she lay in my arms I felt her soft bosom moving with a little hysterical laugh of derision when I said we must part. And then she rose and sat beside me upon the boulder, looking calm and fearless at the tide as it got nearer and nearer to Needle Point.

'Yes, dear,' I said, looking in the same direction, 'you must be going; see how the waves are surrounding the Point. You must run, Winnie—you must run, and leave me.'

'Yes,' said she, still gazing across to the Point, 'as you say, I must run, but not yet, dear; plenty of time yet,' and she smiled to herself as she used to do in the old days, when as a child she had made up her mind to do something.

Then without another word she took her shawl from her shoulders, and pulled it out to see its length. And soon I felt her fingers stealing my penknife from my waistcoat-pocket, and saw her deftly cut up the shawl, strip after strip, and weave it and knot it into a rope, and tie the rope around her waist, and then she stooped to tie it around me.

It was when I felt her warm breath about my neck as she stooped over me to tie that rope, that love was really revealed to me; it was then, and not till then, that all my previous love for Winifred seemed as the flicker of a rushlight to Salaman's cloak of fire; and a feeling of bliss unutterable came upon me, and the night air seemed full of music, and the sky above seemed opening, as she whispered, 'Henry, Henry, Henry, in a few minutes you will be mine.' But the very confidence with which she spoke these simple words startled me as from a dream. 'Suppose,' I thought, 'suppose my last drop of bliss with Winnie were being tasted now!' In a moment I felt like a coward. But then there came a loud crash and a thunder from behind the landslip.

'The settlement!' I cried. 'The coming in of the tide has made the landslip settle!'

When I sat with closed eyes examining my fiery photograph, I had calculated the 'settlement' at the return of the tide as being among the chances of escape. But feeling myself to be engaged in a duel with Circumstance (more cruel than the fiends), I believed that the settlement would come too late for us, or even if it did not come too late, it might not hide away the spectacle. The settlement had come; what had it done for us? This I must know at once.

'Untie the rope,' I said; 'quick, untie the rope, there is a settlement of the landslip.'

'But what has the settlement to do with us?' said Winnie.

'It has to do with us, dear; untie the rope. It has much to do with us, Winnie,' I said; for now the determination to save her life came on me stronger than ever.

When the rope was untied, I said, 'Wait till I call,' and I ran round the corner of the debris. The great upright wall of earth and sward, from which had stared the body of Wynne, had fallen, hiding him and his crime together!

To return round the corner of the landslip and call Winifred was the work of an instant, and, quick as she was in answering my call, by the time she had reached me I had thrown off my coat and boots.

'Now for a run and a tussle with the waves, Winnie,' I said.

'Then we are not going to die?'

'We are going to live. Run; in six more returns of a wave like that there will he four feet of water at the Point.'

'Come along, Snap,' said Winifred, and she flew along the sands without another word.

Ah, she could run!—faster than I could, with my bruised heel! She was there first.

'Leap in, Winnie,' I cried, 'and struggle towards the Point; it will save time. I shall he with you in a second.'

Winifred plunged into the tide (Snap following with a bark), and fought her way so bravely that my fear now was lest she should be out of her depth before I could reach her, and then, clad as she was, she would certainly drown. But never tor a moment did her good sense leave her. When she was nearly waist-high she stopped and turned round, gazing at me as I tore through the shallow water—gazing with a wistful, curious look that her face would have worn had we been playing.

To get round the Point and pull Winifred round was no slight task, for the water was nearly up to my breast, and a woman's clothing seems designed for drowning her. Any other woman than Winifred would have been drowned, and would have drowned me with her. But in straits of this kind the only safety lies in courage.

'What a night's adventures!' said Winifred, after we had turned the Point, and were walking through the shallow water towards the gangway.

We hurried towards the cottage as fast as our wet clothes would permit. On reaching it we found the door unlocked, and entered.

'Father has again gone to bed,' said Winifred, 'and left no candle burning for me.'

And without seeing her face, I knew by the tremor of the hand I clasped that she was listening with shame for the drunken snore that she would never hear again.

I lighted a match, which with a candle I found on a chair.

'Your father is no doubt sound asleep,' I said; 'you will scarcely awake him to-night?'

'Oh dear, no,' said Winifred. 'Good-night. You look quite ill. Ever since you lifted up your head from my breast, when you were thinking so hard, you have looked quite ill.'

Suddenly I remembered that I must be up and on the sands betimes in the morning, to see whether the tide had washed away the fallen earth so as to expose Wynne's body. To prevent Winifred from seeing the stolen cross was now the one important thing in the world.

I bade her good-night and walked towards home.

XI

She was right: those few minutes of concentrated agony had in truth made me ill. My wet clothes clinging round my body began to chill me now, and as I crept into the house and upstairs to my room, my teeth were chattering like castanets.

As I threw off my wet clothes and turned into bed, I was partially forewarned by the throbbing at my temples, the rolling fire at the back of my eyeballs, the thirst in my parched throat, that some kind of illness, some kind of fever, was upon me. And no wonder, after such a night!

In that awful trance, when I had sat with my face buried on Winifred's breast, not only had the physiognomy of the cove, but every circumstance of our lives together, been photographed in my brain in one picture of fire. When, after the concentrated agony of those first moments of tension, I looked up into Winifred's face, as though awakening from a dream, my flesh had 'appeared,' she told me, 'grey and wizened, like the flesh of an old man.' The mental and physical effects of this were now gathering around me and upon me.

From a painful slumber I awoke in about an hour with red-heat at my brain and with a sickening dread at my heart. 'It is fever,' thought I; 'I am going to be ill; and what is there to do in the morning at the ebb of the tide before Winifred can go upon the sands? I ought not to have come home at all,' I said. 'Suppose illness were to seize me and prevent my getting there?' The dreadful thought alone paralysed me quite. Under it I lay as under a nightmare. I scarcely dared try to get out of bed, lest I should find my fears well-grounded. At last, cautiously and timorously, I put one leg out of bed and then the other, till at length I felt the little ridges of the carpet; but my knees gave way, my head swam, my stomach heaved with a deadly nausea, and I fell like a log on the floor.

As I lay there I knew that I was indeed in the grasp of fever. I nearly went crazed from terror at the thought that in a few minutes I should perhaps lapse into unconsciousness and be unable to rise—unable to reach the sands in the morning and seek for Wynne's body—unable even to send some one there as a substitute to perform that task. But then whom was I to send? whom could I entrust with such a commission? I was under a pledge to my dead father never to divulge the secret of the amulet save to my mother and uncle. And besides, if I would effectually save Winifred from the harm I dreaded, the hideous sacrilege committed by her father must be kept a secret from servants and townspeople. Whom then could I send on this errand? At the present moment, there were but four people in the world who knew that the cross and casket had been placed in the coffin—my mother, my uncle, myself, and now, alas! Winifred. My mother was the one person who could do what I wanted done. Her sagacity I knew; her courage I knew. But how could I—how dare I, broach such a matter to her? I felt it would be sheer madness to do so, and yet, in my dire strait, in my terror at the illness I was fighting with, I did it, as I am going to tell.

By this time the noise of my fall had brought up the servants. They lifted me into bed and proposed fetching our medical man. But I forbade them to do so, and said, 'I want to speak to my mother.'

'She is herself unwell, sir,' said the man to whom I spoke.

'I know,' I replied. 'Call her maid and tell her that my business with my mother is very important, or I would not have dreamed of disturbing her; but see her I must.'

The man looked dubious, but observing my wet clothes on a chair he seemed to think that something had happened, and went to do my bidding.

In a very short time my mother entered the room. I felt that my moments of consciousness were brief, and began my story as soon as we were alone. I told her how the sudden dread that Wynne would steal the amulet had come upon me; I told her how I had run down to the churchyard and discovered the landslip; I told her how, on seeing the landslip, I had descended the gangway and found the body of Wynne, the amulet, the casket, and the written curse. But I did not tell her that I had met Winifred on the sands. Excited as I was, I had the presence of mind not to tell her that.

As I proceeded with my narrative, with my mother sitting by my bedside, a look of horror, then a look of loathing, then a look of scorn, swept over her face. I knew that the horror was of the sacrilege. I knew that the loathing and the haughty scorn expressed her feeling towards the despoiler—the father of her whose cause I might have to plead; and I began to wish from the bottom of my heart that I had not taken her into my confidence. When I got to the finding of Tom's body, and the look of terror stamped upon his face, a new expression broke over hers—an expression of triumphant hate that was fearful.

'Thank God at least for that!' she said. Then she murmured, 'But that does not atone.'

Ah! how I regretted now that I had consulted her on a subject where her proud imperious nature must be so deeply disturbed. But it was too late to retreat.

'Henry,' she said, 'this is a shocking story you tell me. After losing my husband this is the worst that could have happened to me—the violation of his sacred tomb. Had I only hearkened to my own misgiving about the miscreant! Yet I wonder you did not wait till the morning before telling me.'

'Wait till the morning?' I said, forgetting that she did not know what was at my heart.

'Doubtless the matter is important, Henry,' said she. 'Still, the mischief is done, the hideous crime has been committed, and the news of it could have waited till morning.'

'But, mother, unless my father's words are idle breath, it is important, most important, that the amulet should again be buried with him. I meant to go to the sands in the morning and wait for the ebbing tide—I meant to take the cross from the breast of the dead man, and to replace it in my father's coffin. That, mother, was what I meant to do. But I am too ill to move; I feel that in an hour or so, or in a few minutes, I shall be delirious. And then, mother! Oh, then!—'My mother looked astonished at my vehemence upon the subject.

'Henry,' she said, 'I had no idea that you felt such an interest in the matter; I have certainly misjudged your character entirely. And now, what do you want me to do?'

'Nobody,' I said, 'must know of the cross but ourselves. I want you, mother, to do what I cannot do: I want you to go on the sands and wait for the turn of the tide; I want you to take the cross from Wynne's breast, if the body should be exposed, and secure it in secret till it can be replaced in the coffin.'

'I do this, Henry?' said my mother, with a look of bewilderment at my earnestness. 'Yet there is reason in what you say, and grievous as the task would be for me, I must consider it.'

'But will you engage to do it, mother?'

'Really, Henry, you forget yourself,—you forget your mother too. For me to go down to the sands and watch the ebbing of the tide, and then defile myself by touching the body of this wretch, is a task I naturally shrink from. Still if, on thinking it over, I find it my duty to do it, it will not be needful for me to enter into a compact with my son that my duty to my dead husband shall be performed. Good-night. I quite think you will be better in the morning. I see no signs myself of the fever you seem to dread, and, alas! I am not, as you know, ignorant of the way in which a fever begins.'

She was going out of the room when I exclaimed, in sheer desperation, 'Mother, I have something else to say to you. You remember the little girl, the little blue-eyed girl, Wynne's daughter, who came here once, and you were so kind to her, so gracious and so kind'; and I seized her hand and covered it with kisses, for I was beside myself with alarm lest my one hope should go.'

The sudden little laugh of bitter scorn that came from my mother's lips, the sudden spasm that shook her frame, the sudden shadow as of night that swept across her features, should at once have hushed my confession. But I went on: my tongue would not stop now: I felt that my eloquence, the eloquence of Winifred's danger, must conquer, must soften even the hard pride of her race.

'And she has never forgotten your graciousness to her, mother.'

'Well?' said my mother, in a tone whose velvet softness withered me.

'Well, mother, she is in all things the very opposite of her father. This very night she told me'—and I was actually on the verge of repeating poor Winifred's prattle about her resembling her mother, and not her father (for already my brain had succumbed to the force of the oncoming fever, and the catastrophe I was dreading made of me a frank and confiding child).

'Well?' said my mother, in a voice softer and more velvety still. 'What did she tell you?'

That tone ought to have convinced me of the folly, the worse than folly, of saying another word to her.

'But I can conquer her,' I thought; 'I can conquer her yet. When she comes to know all the piteousness of Winifred's case, she must yield.'

'Yes, mother,' I cried, 'she is in all things the very opposite of Tom. She has such a horror of sacrilege; she has such a dread of a crime and a curse like this; she has such a superstitious belief in the power of a dead man's curse to cling to the delinquent's offspring, that, if she knew of what her father had done, she would go mad—raving mad, mother—she would indeed!' And I fell hack on the pillow exhausted.

'Well, Henry, and is this what you summoned me from my bed to tell me—that Wynne's daughter will most likely object to share the consequences of her father's crime? A very natural objection, and I am really sorry for her; but further than that I have certainly no affair with her.'

'But, mother, the body of her father lies beneath the debris on the shore; the ebbing tide may leave it exposed, and the poor girl, missing her father in the morning, will seek him perhaps on the shore and find him—find him with the proof of his crime on his breast, and know that she inherits the curse—my father's curse! Oh, think of that, mother—think of it. And you only can prevent it.'

For a few moments there was intense silence in the room. I saw that my mother was reflecting. At last she said:

'You say that Wynne's daughter told you something to-night. Where did you see her?'

'On the sands.'

'At what hour?'

'At—at—at—about eleven, or twelve, or one o'clock.'

I felt that I was getting into a net, but was too ill to know what I was doing. My mother paused for awhile; I waited as the prisoner tried for his life waits when the jury have retired to consult. I clutched the bedclothes to stay the trembling of my limbs. On a chair by my bedside was my watch, which had been stopped by the sea-water. I saw her take it up mechanically, look at it, and lay it down again. In the agony of my suspense I yet observed her smallest movement.

'And in what capacity am I to undertake this expedition?' said she at length, in the same quiet tone, that soul-quelling tone she always adopted when her passion was at white-heat. 'Is it in the capacity of your father's wife executing his wishes about the amulet? Or is it as the friend, protectress, and guardian of Miss Wynne?'

She sat down again by my bedside, and communed with herself—sometimes fixing an abstracted gaze upon me, sometimes looking across me at the very spot where in the shadow beside my bed I bad seemed to see the words of the Psalmist's curse written in letters of fire. At last she said quietly, 'Henry, I will undertake this commission of yours.'

'Dear mother!' I exclaimed in my delight. 'I will undertake it,' pursued my mother in the same quiet tone, 'on one condition.'

'Any condition in the world, mother. There is nothing I will not do, nothing I will not sacrifice or suffer, if you will only aid me in saving this poor girl. Name your condition, mother; you can name nothing I will not comply with.'

'I am not so sure of that, Henry. Let me be quite frank with you. I do not wish to entrap you into making an engagement you cannot keep. You have corroborated to-night what I half suspected when I saw you talking to the girl in the churchyard; there is a very vigorous flirtation going on between you and this wretched man's daughter.'

'Flirtation? 'I said, and the incongruity of the word as applied to such a passion as mine did not vex or wound me; it made me smile.

'Well, for her sake, I hope it is nothing more,' said my mother. 'In view of the impassable gulf between her and you, I do for her sake sincerely hope that it is nothing more than a flirtation.'

'Pardon me, mother,' I said, 'it was the word "flirtation" that made me smile.'

'We will not haggle about words, Henry; give it what name may please you, it is all the same to me. But flirtations of this kind will sometimes grow serious, as the case of Percy Aylwin and the Gypsy girl shows. Now, Henry, I do not accuse you of entertaining the mad idea of really marrying this girl, though such things, as you know, have been in our family. But you are my only son, and I do love you, Henry, whatever may be your opinion on that point; and, because I love you, I would rather, far rather, be a lonely, childless woman in the world, I would far rather see you dead on this floor, than see you marry Winifred Wynne.'

'Ah! mother, the cruelty of this family pride has always been the curse of the Aylwins.'

'It seems cruel to you now, because you are a boy, a generous boy. You think it the romantic, poetic thing to elevate a low girl to your own station—perhaps even to show your superiority to conventions by marrying the daughter of the miscreant who has desecrated your own father's tomb. But, Henry, I know the race to which you and I belong. In five years' time—in three years, or perhaps in two—you will thank me for this; you will say: "My mother's love was not cruel, but wise."'

'Oh, mother!' I said, 'any condition but that.'

'I see that you know what my condition is before I utter it. If you will give me your word—and the word of an Aylwin is an oath—if you will give me your word that you will never marry Winifred Wynne, I will do as you desire. I will myself go upon the sands in the morning, and if the body has been exposed by the tide I will secure the evidence of her father's guilt, in order to save the girl from the suffering which the knowledge of that guilt would cause her, as you suppose.'

'As I suppose!'

'Again I say, Henry, we will not quarrel about words.'

I turned sick with despair.

'And on no other terms, mother?'

'On no other terms,' said she.

'Oh, mercy, mother! mercy! you know not what you do. I could not live without her; I should die without her.'

'Better die then!' exclaimed my mother, with an expression of ineffable scorn, and losing for the first time her self-possession; 'better die than marry like that.'

'She is my very life now, mother.'

'Have I not said you had better die then? On no other terms will I go on those sands. But I tell you frankly what I think about this matter. I think that you absurdly exaggerate the effect the knowledge of her father's crime will have upon the girl.'

'No, no; I do not. Mercy, dear mother, mercy! I am your only child.'

'That is the very reason why you, who may some day be the heir of one of the first houses in England, must never marry Winifred Wynne.'

'But I don't want to be heir of the Aylwins; I don't want my uncle's property,' I retorted. 'Nor do I want the other bauble prizes of the Aylwins.'

'Providence has taken Frank, and says you must stand where you stand,' replied my mother solemnly. 'You may even some day, should Cyril be childless, succeed to the earldom, and then what an alliance would this be!'

'Earldom! I'd not have it. I'd trample on the coronet. Gingerbread! I'd trample it in the mud, if it were to sever me from Winifred.'

'You must succeed to it should Cyril Aylwin, who seems disinclined to marry, die childless,' said my mother quietly; 'and by that time you may perhaps have reached man's estate.'

'Pity, mother, pity!' I cried in despair, as I looked at the strong woman who bore me.

'Pity upon whom? Have pity upon me, and upon the family you now represent. As to all the fearful effects that the knowledge of this sacrilege will have upon the girl, that is a subject upon which you must allow me to have my own opinion. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and provides thick skins for the canaille. What will concern her chiefly, perhaps entirely, will be the loss of her father, and she will soon know of that, whether she finds the body on the sands or not. This kind of person is not nearly so sensitive as my romantic Henry supposes. However, my condition will not be departed from. If you consent to give up this girl I will go on the sands; I will defile my fingers; I will secure the stolen amulet at the ebb of the tide, should the corpse become exposed. If you will not consent to give her up, there is an end of the matter, and words are being wasted between us.'

'Give up Winifred, mother? That is not possible.'

'Then there is no more to be said. We will not waste our time in discussing impossibilities. And I am really so depressed and unwell that I must return to my room. I hope to hear you are better in the morning, and I think you will be. The excitement of this night and your anxiety about the girl have unstrung your nerves, and you have lost that courage and endurance which are yours by birthright.'

And she left the room.

But she had no sooner gone than there came before my eyes the insupportable picture of a slim figure walking along the sands stooping to look at some object among the debris, standing aghast at the sight of her dead father with the evidence of his hideous crime on his own breast; there came the sound of a cry to 'Henry' for help! I beat my head against the bedstead till I was nearly stunned. I yelled and bellowed like a maniac: 'Mother, come back!'

When she returned to my bedside my eyes were glaring so that my mother stood appalled, and (as she afterwards owned to me) was nearly yielding her point.

'Mother,' I said,'I consent to your condition: I will give her up—but oh, save her! Let there be no dallying, let there be no risk, mother. Let nothing prevent your going upon the sands in the morning—early, quite early—and every morning at the ebbing of the tide.'

'I will keep my word,' she said.

'You will use the fullest and best means to save her?'

'I will keep my word,' she said, and left the room.

'I have saved her!' I cried over and over again, as I sank back on my pillow. Then the delirium of fever came upon me, and I lay tossing as upon a sea of fire.

XII

Weak in body and in mind as an infant, I woke again to consciousness. Through the open window the sunlight, with that tender golden-yellow tone which comes with morning in England, was pouring between the curtains, and illuminating the white counterpane. Then a soft breeze came and slightly moved the curtains, and sent the light and shadows about the bed and the opposite wall—a breeze laden with the scent I always associated with Wynne's cottage, the scent of geraniums. I raised myself on my elbows, and gazed over the geraniums on the window-sill at the blue sky, which was as free of clouds as though it were an Italian one, save that a little feathery cloud of a palish gold was slowly moving towards the west.

'It is shaped like a hand,' I said dreamily, and then came the picture of Winifred in the churchyard singing, and pointing to just such a golden cloud, and then came the picture of Tom Wynne reeling towards us from the church porch, and then came everything in connection with him and with her; everything down to the very last words which I had spoken about her to my mother before unconsciousness had come upon me. But what I did not know—what I was now burning to know without delay—was what time had passed since then.

I called out 'Mother!' A nurse, who was sitting in the room, but hidden from me by a large carved and corniced oak wardrobe, sprang up and told me that she would go and fetch my mother.

'Mother,' I said, when she entered the room, 'you've been?'

'Yes,' said she, taking a seat by my bedside, and motioning the nurse to leave us.

'And you were in time, mother!'

'More than in time,' said she. 'There was nothing to do. I have realised, however, that your extraordinary and horrible story was true. It was not a fever-dream. The tomb has been desecrated.'

'But, mother, you went as you promised to the sands in Church Cove, and you waited for the ebb of the tide?'

'I did.'

'And you found—'

'Nothing; no corpse exposed.'

'And you went again the next day?'

'I did.'

'And you found—'

'Nothing.'

'But how many days have passed, mother? How many days have I been lying here?'

'Seven.'

'And no sign of—of the body was to be seen?'

'None. The wretch must have been buried for ever beneath the great mass of the fallen cliff. I went no more.'

'Oh, mother, you should have gone every day. Think of the frightful risk, mother. On the very day after you ceased your visits the body might have been turned up by the tide, and she might have gone and seen it.'

The picture was too terrible. I fell back exhausted. I revived, however, in a somewhat calmer mood. When my mother came into the room again, I returned at once to the subject. I reproached her bitterly for not having gone every day. She listened to my reproaches in entire calmness.

'It was idle to keep repeating these visits every day,' said she, 'and I consider that I have fully performed my part of the compact. I expect you to fulfil yours.'

I remained silent, preparing for a deadly struggle with the only being on earth I had ever really feared.

'I have fully kept my word, Henry,' said she, 'and have done for you more than my duty to your father's memory warranted me in doing.'

'But, mother, you did not do all that you promised to do; you did not prevent all risk of Winifred's finding it. She may find it even yet.'

'That is not likely now. I have performed my part of the compact, and I expect you to perform yours.'

'You did not use all means to save my Winifred from worse than death—from madness; you did not use all means to save me from dying of self-murder or of a broken heart; and the compact is broken. Whether or not I could have kept my faith with you by breaking troth with her, it is you who have set me free. Mother,' I said, fiercely, 'in such a compact it must be the letter of the bond.'

'Mean subterfuge, unworthy of your descent,' said my mother quietly, but with one of those looks of hers that used to frighten me once.

'No, no, mother; you have not kept the letter of the bond, and I am free. You did not take the fullest and best means to save Winifred. Your compact was to save her from the risk I told you of. And, mother, mother, listen to me!' I cried, in a state of crazy excitement now: 'in the darkest moment of my life, when I was prostrate and helpless, you were pitiless as Pride. Listen, mother: Winifred Wynne shall be mine. Not all the Aylwins that have ever eaten of wheat and fattened the worms shall prevent that. She shall be mine. I say, she shall be mine!'

'The daughter of the man who desecrated my husband's tomb!'

'And my father's! That man's daughter shall be my wife,' I said, sitting up in bed and looking into those eyes, bright and proud, which had been wont to make all other eyes blink and quail.

'Cursed by your father, and cursed by God—'

'That curse—for what it may be worth—I take upon my own head; the curse shall be mine. Even if I believed the threat about the "desolate places," I would be there; if bare-footed she had to beg from door to door, rest assured, mother, that an Aylwin would hold the wallet—would leave the whole Aylwin brood, their rank, their money, and their stupid, vulgar British pride, to walk beside the beggar.'

The look on my mother's face would have terrified most people. It would have terrified me once, but in the frenzy into which I had then passed, nothing would have made me quail.

'Your services, mother, are no longer needed,' I said. 'Wynne's corpse might have been washed up by the tide, and your compact was to be there to see; but now, most likely, it is hidden, not under the loose fragments as I had feared, but under the great mass of earth,—hidden for ever.'

'But you forget,' said my mother, 'that the amulet has to be recovered.'

'Mother,' I said, in the state of wild suspiciousness concerning her and her motives into which I had now passed, 'I know what your words imply,—that Winifred is not yet out of danger; the evidence of the curse and the crime can be dug up.'

'I have no wish to harm the girl, Henry. You mistake me.'

'Then, mother, we must not mistake each other in this matter,' I said. 'You have alluded to the word of an Aylwin. With me, as with the best of us, the word of an Aylwin is an oath. Wynne's corpse is now hidden; the cross is now hidden; I give you the word of an Aylwin that the man who digs up that corpse I will kill. I will not consider that he is an irresponsible agent of yours; I will kill him, and his blood shall be upon the head of her who sends him, knowing, to his death.'

'And be hanged,' said my mother.

'Perhaps. But after her father's crime has been exposed, the first thing for me is—to kill!'

'Why, boy, there's murder in your eyes!' said my mother, taken off her guard.

'Oh, mother, mother, can you not see that no wolf with a stolen lamb in its mouth was ever more pitilessly shot down by the owner of that lamb than any hireling wolf of yours would be shot down by me?'

'Boy, are you quite demented?'

'Listen, mother. To prevent Winifred from knowing that her father had stolen that amulet, and so brought down upon her the curse, I would have drowned her with myself in the tide. We sat waiting for the tide to drown us, when the settlement came at the last moment and buried it away from her. Is it likely that I should hesitate to kill a clodhopper, or a score, if only to take my vengeance on you and Fate? The homicide now will be yours.'

She left, giving me a glance of defiance; but before our eyes ended that conflict, I saw which of us had conquered.

'Hate is strong,' I murmured, as I sank down on my pillow, 'and destiny is strong; but oh, Winnie, Winnie—stronger than hate, and stronger than destiny and death, is love. She knows, Winnie, that the life of the man who should dig up that corpse would not be worth an hour's purchase; she knows, Winnie, that in the court of conscience she alone is answerable now for what may befall; and you are safe! But poor mother! My poor dear mother, whom once I loved so dearly, was it indeed you I struggled with just now? Mother, mother, was it you?'

This interview retarded my recovery, and I had a serious relapse.

The fever was a severe one. The symptoms were aggravated by these most painful and trying interviews with my mother, and by my increasing anxiety about the fate of Winifred. Yet my vigorous constitution began to show signs of conquering. Of Winifred I could learn nothing, save what could be gleaned from the servants in attendance, who seemed merely to have heard that Tom Wynne was missing, that he had probably fallen drunk over the cliff and been washed out to sea, and that his daughter was seeking him everywhere. As the days passed by, however, and no hint reached me that the corpse had been found on the sands, I concluded that, when the larger mass finally settled on the night of the landslip, the corpse had fallen immediately beneath it, and was buried under the main mass. Yet, from what I had seen of the corpse's position, in the rapid view I had of it, perched on the upright mass of sward, I did not understand how this could be.

And so anxiety after anxiety delayed my progress. Still, on the whole, I felt that the body would not now be dislodged by the tides, and that Winifred would at least be spared a misery compared with which even her uncertainty about her father's fate would be bearable. But how I longed to be up and with her!

Dr. Mivart, who attended me, a young medical man of much ability who had finished his medical education in Paris, and had lately settled at Raxton, came every day with great punctuality.

One day, however, he arrived three hours behind his usual time, and seemed to think that some explanation was necessary.

'I must apologise,' said he, 'for my unpunctuality to-day, but the fact is that, at the very moment of starting, I was delayed by one of the most interesting—one of the most extraordinary cases that ever came within my experience, even at the Salpetriere Hospital, where we were familiar with the most marvellous cases of hysteria—a seizure brought on by terror in which the subject's countenance mimics the appearance of the terrible object that has caused it. A truly wonderful case! I have just written to Marini about it.'

He seemed so much interested in his case, that he aroused a certain interest in me, though at that time the word 'hysteria' conveyed an impression to me of a very uncertain and misty kind.

'Where did it occur?' I asked.

'Here, in your own town,' said Mivart. 'A most extraordinary case. My report will delight Marini, our great authority, as you no doubt are aware, on catalepsy and cataleptic ecstasy.'

'Strange that I have heard nothing of it!' I said.

'Oh!' replied Mivart, 'it occurred only this morning. Some fishermen passing below the old church were attracted, first by a shriek of a peculiarly frightful and unearthly kind, and then by some unusual appearance on the sands, at the spot where the last landslip took place.'

My pulses stopped in a moment, and I clung to the back of my chair.

'What—did—the fishermen see?' I gasped.

'The men landed,' continued Mivart,—too much interested in the case to observe my emotion,—'and there they found a dead body—the body of the missing organist here, who had apparently fallen with the landslip. The face was horribly distorted by terror, the skull shattered, and around the neck was slung a valuable cross made of precious stones. But the most interesting feature of the case is this, that in front of the body, in a fit of a remarkable kind, squatted his daughter—you may have seen her, an exceedingly pretty girl lately come from Wales or somewhere—and on her face was reflected and mimicked, in the most astonishing way, the horrible expression on the face of the corpse, while the fingers of her right hand were so closely locked around the cross—'

I felt that from my mouth there issued a voice not mine—a long smothered shriek like that which had seemed to issue from my mouth on that awful night when, looking out of the window, I had heard the noise of the landslip. Then I felt myself whispering 'The Curse!' Then I knew no more.

XIII

I had another dangerous relapse, and was delirious for two days, I think. When I came to myself, the first words I uttered to Mivart, whom I found with me, were inquiries about Winifred. He was loth at first to revive the subject, though he supposed that the effect of his narrative upon me had arisen partly from my weakness and partly from what he called his 'sensational way' of telling the story. (My mother had been very careful to drop no hint of the true state of the case.) At last, however, Mivart told me all he knew about Winifred, while I hid my face in my pillow and listened.

'In the seizures (which are recurrent) the girl,' he said, 'mimics the expression of terror on her father's face. Between the paroxysms she lapses into a strange kind of dementia. It is as though her own mind had fled and the body had been entered by the soul of a child. She will then sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a watch or a musical box are stopped if it falls.'

He could tell me nothing about her, he said, nor what had become of her since she had left his hands.

'The parish officer is taking his holiday,' he added. 'I mean to inquire about her. I wish I could take her to Paris to the Salpetriere, where Marini is treating such cases by transmitting through magnetism the patient's seizure to a healthy subject.'

'Will she recover?'

'Without the Salpetriere treatment?'

'Will she recover?' I asked, maddened beyond endurance by all this cold-blooded professional enthusiasm about a case which was simply a case of life and death to Winnie and me.

'She may, unless the seizures become too frequent for the strength of the constitution. In that event, of course, she would succumb. She is entirely harmless, let me tell you.'

He told me that she was at the cottage, where some good soul was seeing after her.

'I'll get up,' I said, trying to rise.

'Get up!' said the doctor, astonished; 'why do you want to get up? You are not strong enough to sit in a chair yet.'

This was, alas! but too true, and my great object now was to conceal my weakness; for I determined to get out as soon as my legs could carry me, though I should drop down dead on the road.

I gathered from the doctor and the servants that the sacrilege had now become publicly known, and had caused much excitement. Wynne had evidently been slightly intoxicated when he committed it, and had taken no care to conceal the proofs that the grave had been tampered with. At the inquest the amulet had been identified and claimed by my mother.

It was some days before I got out, and then I went at once to the cottage. It was a lovely evening as I walked down Wilderness Road. It was not till I reached the little garden-gate that I began fully to feel how weak my illness had left me. The gate was half open, and I looked over into the garden, which was already forlorn and deserted. Some instinct told me she was not there. The little flower-beds looked shaggy, grass-grown, and uncared for. In the centre, among the geraniums, phlox-beds, and French marigolds, sat a dirty-white hen, clucking and calling a brood of dirty-white chickens. The box-bordered gravelled paths, which Wynne, in spite of his drunkenness, used to keep always so neat, were covered with leaves, shaken by the wind from the trees surrounding the garden. One of the dark green shutters was unfastened, and stood out at right-angles from the wall—a token of desertion. On the diamond panes of the upper windows, round which the long tendrils of grape-vines were drooping, the gorgeous sunset was reflected, making the glass gleam as though a hundred little fires were playing behind it. When I reached the door, the paint of which seemed far more cracked with the sun than it had looked a few weeks before, I found on knocking that the cottage was empty. I did not linger, but went at once into the town to inquire about her.