te after minute they watched in silence. The last misty shred of wild
fowl floated seaward and was lost against the clouds.

"Is there a path to the Etang?" he asked quietly.

"Yes. I will go with you----"

"No."

"Why?"

"No. Show me the path."

His shotgun stood by the door; he took it with him as he left the house
beside her. In the moat, close by the bridge, and pointing toward the
house, L'Ombre lay motionless. They saw it as they passed, but did not
speak of it to each other. At the forest's edge he halted: "Is this the
path?"

"Yes.... May I not go?"

"No--please."

"Is there danger?"

"No.... I don't know if there is any danger."

"Will you be cautious, then?"

He turned and looked at her in the dim light. Standing so for a little
while they remained silent. Then he drew a deep, quiet breath. She held
out one hand, slowly; half way he bent and touched her fingers with his
lips; released them. Her arm fell listlessly at her side.

After he had been gone a long while, she turned away, moving with head
lowered. At the bridge she waited for him.

A red moon rose low in the east. It became golden above the trees, paler
higher, and deathly white in mid-heaven.

It was long after midnight when she went into the house to light fresh
candles. In the intense darkness before dawn she lighted two more and set
them in an upper window on the chance that they might guide him back.

At five in the morning every clock struck five.

She was not asleep; she was lying on a lounge beside the burning candles,
listening, when the door below burst open and there came the trampling
rush of feet, the sound of blows, a fall----

A loud voice cried:--"Because you are armed and not in uniform!--you
British swine!"--

And the pistol shots crashed through the house.

On the stairs she swayed for an instant, grasped blindly at the rail.
Through the floating smoke below the dead man lay there by the latticed
window--where they had sat together--he and she----

Spectres were flitting to and fro--grey shapes without faces--things with
eyes. A loud voice dinned in her ears, beat savagely upon her shrinking
brain:

"You there on the stairs!--do you hear? What are those candles? Signals?"

She looked down at the dead man.

"Yes," she said.

Through the crackling racket of the fusillade, down, down into roaring
darkness she fell.

After a few moments her slim hand moved, closed over the dead man's. And
moved no mor