his side, and nothing at all about the
results of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After
their return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for
the _Record_, and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the
paper's local representative.

This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never
taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The
more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more
evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and all
that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the
exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed in
body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw the more
clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and was more
bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now at least
his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened. He would
neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the course of
the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to do in the
morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much serious hope,
he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot into the sky, as
it were, the day before.

The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the
cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea-level, where the
face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked down,
hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of all the
movements of water, the wash of a light sea over broken rock. But no
rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough
platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and
walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the
cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her
drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant liner,
her face full of some dream.

This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his
eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face of
Southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with color on the
cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there
was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the
point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something l