he one thing they knew for certain was that she never came back
to La Closerie, and after due interval, and consequent on other matters,
they broke open the door and resumed possession of the house.

Night after night Gard slowly crossed the Coupee, lingered in its
shadows, went on into Little Sark, and came lingering back.

And night after night the Doctor and the Senechal lay in the heather of
the headlands, guns in hand, waiting for something that never came, and
then going stiffly home to one or other of their houses, to lubricate
their joints and console their disappointment with hot punch and much
tobacco.

"I'm afraid it's no go," was the Doctor's grudging verdict at last, on
the fourteenth blank night.

"Let's keep on," said Gard. "Things generally happen just when you don't
expect them."

"That's so," grunted the Senechal. And they decided to keep on.

Fortunately, the nights were warm and mostly fine. When neither moon nor
stars afforded him light enough for a safe crossing, he took a lantern,
so that no one who desired to knock him on the head need miss the chance
for lack of seeing him.

And when, after their lonely waiting, the watchers in the heather saw
the lantern come joggling down the steep cutting from Sark, they braced
themselves for eventualities, and hefted their guns, and pricked up
their ears and made ready.

And when it had wavered slowly along the path between the great pits of
darkness on either hand, and had gone joggling on into Little Sark, they
sank back into their formes with each his own particular exclamation,
and lay waiting till the light came back.

Times of tension and endurance which told upon them all, but bore most
heavily on Gard, since the onslaught, when it came, must fall upon him,
and the absolute ignorance as to how and when and whence it might come,
kept every nerve within him strung like a fiddle-string.

It was the eeriest experience he had ever had, that nightly trip across
the Coupee;--bad enough when moon or stars afforded him vague and
distorted glimpses of his ghostly surroundings:--ten times worse when
the flicker of his lantern barely kept him to the path, and the broken
gleams ran over the rugged edges and tumbled into the black gulfs at the
sides;--when every starting shadow might be a murderer leaping out upon
him, every foot of the walling darkness the murderer's cover, and every
step he took a step towards death.

A trip, I assure you, that not m