"Oh the creaking, the creaking! Will no one stop that creaking! Must I
hear it go on creak, creak, creak for ever, and see it sway and
sway.... Will no one ever stop it!"

Sir Adrian took a sudden resolution. "I will," he said, low and clear
into her ear. She sank down on the instant and looked at him, back
from her far distance, almost as if she understood him and the pitiful
cry for the help he would have given his heart's blood to procure for
her, was silent for the moment upon her lips.

"I will prepare an opiate," said the physician in a whisper.

"And I," said Sir Adrian to him, with a strange expression upon his
pale face, "am going to stop that creaking."

The man of medicine gazed after him with a look of intense
astonishment which rapidly changed to one of professional interest.

"It is evident that I shall soon have another mentally deranged
patient to see to," he remarked to himself as he rose to seek the
drugs he meant to administer.

Downstairs, Sir Adrian immediately called for Rene, and being informed
that he had left for the island early in the afternoon and had
announced his return before night, cast a cloak over his shoulders and
hurried forth in the hope of meeting him upon his homeward way. His
pulses were beating well-nigh as wildly as those of the fever stricken
woman upstairs in the house. He dared not pause to reflect on his
purpose, or seek to disentangle the confusion of his thoughts, for
fear of being confronted with the hopelessness of their folly. But the
exquisite serenity of the night sky, where swam the moon, "a silver
splendour;" the freshness of the sweeping breeze that dashed, keen
from the east, over the sea against his face; all the glorious
distance, the unconsciousness and detachment of nature from the fume
and misery of life, brought him unwittingly to a calmer mood.

He had reached the extreme confine of the pine wood, when, across the
sands that stretched unbroken to the lips of the sea, a figure
advanced towards him.

"Renny!" called Sir Adrian.

"Your honour!" cried the man, breaking into a run to meet him. O God!
how ghostly white looked the master's face in the moon-flood!

"My Lady----?"

"Not worse; yet not better--and that means worse now. But there is a
change. Renny," sinking his voice and clasping the man's sturdy arm
with clammy hand, "is it true they have placed him on the sands
to-day?"

The man stared.

"How did your honour know? Yes--they have do