swallowed up the mysterious night-walker. It was
some little time before she collected sufficient fortitude to creep
back whence she had come, her plan unfulfilled, her courage melted.
She was bitterly ashamed, yet felt as if she had escaped from some
great evil. Once in the nursery, she locked the door, lighted a
candle, and, after she had looked to ascertain that the children were
sleeping soundly, she opened her dressing-case and took out a little
box of cachets that had been prescribed for her a year before when
bitter trouble had stolen sleep for many a night. She felt, and with
some reason, that this was an occasion when it would not be too
cowardly to resort to artificial means of restoring her nerves by
sleep. For though fright and surprise had bereft her, for the time
being, of her nerve, her firm spirit was neither beaten nor cowed. She
meant to see this thing through, and her last waking thought was a
murmured prayer for help to steel her heart against terrors that walked
by night, and to resist to the utmost any menace of evil that should
approach the little children in her charge.

PART II

There followed some tranquil days of which nothing broke the peaceful
monotony. The children were extraordinarily tractable, perhaps because
Mrs. van Cannan seemed too preoccupied to lay any injunctions upon
them. True, Roddy made one of his mysterious disappearances, but it
was not long before Christine, hard on his heels, discovered him
emerging from an outhouse, where she later assured herself that he
could have come to no great harm, for it was merely a big barn stacked
with grain and forage, and a number of old packing cases. Nothing
there to account for the expression he wore--that same suggestion of
tears fiercely restrained which she had noticed when they were looking
at the unmarked grave in the cemetery. It wrung her heart to see his
young mouth pursed up to whistle a tune that would not come, the look
of longing in eyes where only happiness and the divine contentment of
childhood should dwell; but the boy volunteered no information, and she
did not press him. She wanted his confidence, not to have him regard
her as a sort of jailer.

Every day, in the cool of the early morning, while the others were
still sleeping, he and she visited the graveyard, starting the good
work of making it blossom like the rose, as Christine had promised.
They planted lilies and geraniums over the little brothers,