treet-lamp that shone on the basement-window of the parlour.

"Excuse me a minute," muttered Hilda, frowning. By one of her swift and
unreflecting impulses she abandoned George Cannon and her private
affairs, and scurried by the area steps into the street.

III

Bareheaded, and with no jacket or mantle, Sarah Gailey was walking
quickly down Preston Street towards the promenade, and Hilda, afraid but
courageous, followed her at a distance of thirty or forty yards. Hilda
could not decide why she was afraid, nor why it should be necessary, in
so simple an undertaking as a walk down Preston Street, to call upon her
courage. Assuming even that Sarah Gailey turned round and caught
her--what then? The consequences could not be very terrible. But Sarah
Gailey did not turn round. She went straight forward, as though on a
definite errand in a town with which she was perfectly familiar, and,
having arrived at the corner of Preston Street and the promenade,
unhesitatingly crossed the muddy roadway of the promenade, and, after a
moment's halt, vanished down the steps in the sea-wall to the left-hand
of the pier. The pier, a double rope of twinkling lamps, hung magically
over the invisible sea, and at the end of it, constant and grave, a red
globe burned menacingly in the wind-haunted waste of the night. And
Hilda thought, as she hastened with gathering terror across the
promenade: "Out there, at the end of the pier, the water is splashing
and beating against the piles!"

She stopped at the parapet of the sea-wall, and looked behind her, like
a thief. The wrought-iron entrance to the pier was highly illuminated,
but except for a man's head and shoulders caged in the ticket-box of the
turnstile, there was no life there; the man seemed to be waiting
solitary with everlasting patience in the web of wavering flame beneath
the huge dark sky. Scores of posters, large and small, showed that
Robertson's "School" was being performed in the theatre away over the
sea at the extremity of the pier. The promenade, save for one gigantic
policeman, and a few distant carriages, was apparently deserted, and the
line of dimly lighted hotels, stretching vaguely east and west, had an
air grim and forlorn at that hour.

Hilda ran down the steps; at the bottom another row of lamps defined the
shore, and now she could hear the tide lapping ceaselessly amid the
supporting ironwork of the pier. She at once descried the figure of
Sarah Gailey in the glo