at hand. The moon looked less vivid in the sky.
And nothing remained but to find what sleep I could.

But at that instant my senses quickened. I could hardly call it a
start--it was just a sudden wakening of mind and body. I wasn't the
least sure.... Perhaps in a moment the old lull, the well-remembered
sense of well-being and security would return. It had seemed to me that
a swift shadow glided through the grayness at the shore of the lagoon.

The window afforded a remarkably wide glimpse of that particular part of
the estate. The rift in the trees permitted a view of scattered segments
of the rock wall itself. And it wasn't to be that I could turn and leave
them to the gray of morning. In that mysterious, eerie light I saw the
whisking shadow again.

It was not merely some little creeping thing from the forest--some
living creature such as stirs about at the first ray of dawn. The shadow
was much too large. I would have thought, at the first glance, that it
was the shadow of a man. But at that instant the figure emerged into the
open, and I knew the truth.

The trim form on the shore of the lagoon was that of Edith Nealman. I
could see her outline with entire plainness, dark against the gray. Some
errand of stealth had taken her down to the shore of the lagoon the
moment that it was left unguarded.

In an instant she disappeared, and in the interval I found out how
deeply and inexplicably startled I was. And then I saw her again,
walking out on the natural rock bridge, and carrying some heavy object,
that dragged on the rocks, in her arms.

I could see her stooped figure, and the shadow of the thing that
dragged. And there is no telling under Heaven the thoughts and the
terrors that swept through me as to what that dragging thing might be.

But in an instant I saw what it was. It was a rather long, heavy plank,
certainly of wood. She was about two hundred feet out on the rock wall
by now, and I saw that she was launching the plank to the right of the
wall, in the water of the lagoon. Before I could wonder or exclaim she
herself had slipped in with it, her arms pale white from the shoulders
of her dark bathing suit, wading out and guiding the heavy plank beside
her.

No man who had read that mysterious script could doubt what her purpose
was. She had gone fourteen rods out on the wall, and then she had turned
to the right into the lagoon. Plainly she was searching for Jason's
treasure.

She, too, knew the k