ildren!'

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 eviden