of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went
in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said:
"Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the
fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was
held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it
were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became
more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture
of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her
wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"

That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped
back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he
muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric
switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her
hands.

"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"

"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the
sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it
difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In
the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the
right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there
over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for
years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right
up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."

Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked
foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story,
"But when did you find the lantern?"

"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way
along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon
as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the
lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."

They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any
moment it might move or speak.

"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the
light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of
those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened
yet!"

He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."

"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"

He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's