re's
voice, looked at him from Gaspare's eyes, and in Gaspare's soul waited
surely to know how it would be redeemed.

He turned from the sea and looked towards the cliff. Now he had the
palace on his left hand. On his right, not far off, was a high bluff
going almost sheer into the sea. Nevertheless, access to the village
was possible by the strip of rocks beneath it. Had Hermione gone to the
village by the rocks? If she had, Gaspare's keen eyes would surely have
seen her. Artois looked at the blank wall of the palace. This extended
a little way, then turned at right angles. Just beyond the angle, in its
shadow, there was a low and narrow doorway. Artois moved along the wall,
reached this doorway, stood without it, and listened.

The grass here grew right up to the stones of the ruin. He had come
almost without noise. Before him he saw blackness, the blackness of a
passage extending from the orifice of the doorway to an interior chamber
of the palace. He heard the peculiar sound of moving water that is beset
and covered in by barriers of stone, a hollow and pugnacious murmur, as
of something so determined that it would be capable of striving through
eternity, yet of something that was wistful and even sad.

For an instant he yielded his spirit to this sound of eternal striving.
Then he said:

"Hermione!"

No one answered.

"Hermione!"

He raised his voice. He almost called the name.

Still there was no answer. Yet the silence seemed to tell him that she
was near.

He did not call again. He waited a moment, then he stepped into the
passage.

The room to which it led was the central room, or hall, of the palace--a
vaulted chamber, high and narrow, opening to the sea at one end by the
great doorway already mentioned, to the land beneath the cliff by a
smaller doorway at the other. The faint light from without, penetrating
through these facing doorways, showed to Artois a sort of lesser
darkness, towards which he walked slowly, feeling his way along the
wall. When he reached the hall he again stood still, trying to get
accustomed to the strange and eerie obscurity, to pierce it with his
eyes.

Now to his left, evidently within the building, and not far from where
he stood, he heard almost loudly the striving of the sea. He heard the
entering wave push through some narrow opening, search round the walls
for egress, lift itself in a vain effort to emerge, fall back baffled,
retreat, murmuring discontent, only