w you; and you shall take
a great deal--yes, as much as you can carry--if only you will go
away, and never be rash again."

A second time I heard Captain Branscome's voice calling to me,
demanding to know where I had disappeared.

She put a finger to her lips, smiling. "Such treasure you never did
see. . . . Even Rosa does not know. . . . Come, little boy!"

She pushed her way through the laurels, and I followed her. The edge
of the shrubbery overhung the dry bed of a torrent, in the cleft of
which, when we had lowered ourselves over the edge, we were
completely hidden from the house. From the edge a slope of loose
stones ran down to the bottom of the cleft, where a thin stream of
water trickled. The stones slid with me, but not dangerously; and as
we scurried down--I in my thick boots, she in her diminutive
dancing-shoes--I heard Plinny's voice join with Captain Branscome's
in calling my name. But by this time I was committed to the
adventure, and by-and-by they desisted, supposing (as Plinny told me
later) that I had taken French leave again, and run off to be first
at the clump of trees.

We might not climb the slope directly in face of us; for, by so doing
(even if it had been accessible, which I doubt), we should have
emerged into view. We therefore bent our way to the right up the
bottom of the gorge, to a narrow tongue of rock dividing it, in the
shelter of which we mounted the rough stairway of the torrent bed
from one flat rock to another until we stepped out upon a shallow
plateau where the contour of the hills shut off the house and its
terraces. We stood, as I judged, upon the reverse or northern side
of that ridge which to the south and west overlooked the valley of
the treasure. Above the plateau a stone-strewn scarp of earth led to
the forest, which reached to the very summit of the ridge; and
towards the summit, after pausing for a second or two to pant and
catch her breath, my strange guide continued her climb.

"What is your name, little boy?"

I told her, and she repeated it once or twice, to get it by heart.

"You may call me 'Metta," she said. "_He_ calls me 'Metta always,
when he is pleased with me, and that is almost every day. He is kind
to me; oh, yes, very kind--though terrible, of course. . . . Keep on
my left hand, Harry Brooks; so the breeze here will not blow from me
to you."

I drew up in a kind of giddiness, for that dreadful scent of death
had touched me again. She,