me on down here to me!"

I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if
it was like to leap out of me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred
questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips. His
face frightened me. I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of horror.
He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a footmark on the
sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight towards
the rocky ledge called the South Spit. The mark was not yet blurred out
by the rain--and the girl's boot fitted it to a hair.

The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the footmark, without saying a word.

I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had
failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down
and down to where the rocks and the sand joined. The South Spit was just
awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden face
of the Shivering Sand. Now this way and now that, with an obstinate
patience that was dreadful to see, Sergeant Cuff tried the boot in the
footsteps, and always found it pointing the same way--straight TO the
rocks. Hunt as he might, no sign could he find anywhere of the footsteps
walking FROM them.

He gave it up at last. Still keeping silence, he looked again at me; and
then he looked out at the waters before us, heaving in deeper and deeper
over the quicksand. I looked where he looked--and I saw his thought in
his face. A dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on a sudden. I
fell upon my knees on the beach.

"She has been back at the hiding-place," I heard the Sergeant say to
himself. "Some fatal accident has happened to her on those rocks."

The girl's altered looks, and words, and actions--the numbed, deadened
way in which she listened to me, and spoke to me--when I had found her
sweeping the corridor but a few hours since, rose up in my mind, and
warned me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his guess was wide of the
dreadful truth. I tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me up. I
tried to say, "The death she has died, Sergeant, was a death of her own
seeking." No! the words wouldn't come. The dumb trembling held me in its
grip. I couldn't feel the driving rain. I couldn't see the rising tide.
As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature came back before me.
I saw her again as I had seen her in the past time--on the morning when
I went to fetch her into the house. I heard her again, tell