ucetta, the wise, the careful little
Lucetta!"

"But I will," she cried, meeting his eye with the courage and constancy
of a martyr, "though I bring destruction upon myself. I will denounce
you and do it before the night has settled down upon us. I have a lover
to avenge, a brother to defend. Besides, the earth should be rid of such
a monster as you."

"Such a monster as I? Well, my pretty one,"--his voice grown suddenly
wheedling, his face a study of mingled passions,--"we will see about
that. Come just a step nearer, Lucetta. I want to see if you are really
the little girl I used to dandle on my knee."

They were now near the gateway. They had been moving all this time. His
hand was on the curb of the old well. His face, so turned that it caught
the full glare of the setting sun, leaned toward the girl, exerting a
fascinating influence upon her. She took the step he asked, and before
we could shriek out "Beware!" we saw him bend forward with a sudden
quick motion and then start upright again, while her form, which but an
instant before had stood there in all its frail and inspired beauty,
tottered as if the ground were bending under it, and in another moment
disappeared from our appalled sight, swallowed in some dreadful cavern
that for an instant yawned in the smoothly cut lawn before us, and then
vanished again from sight as if it had never been.

A shriek from my whistle mingled with a simultaneous cry of agony from
Loreen. We heard Mr. Gryce rush from behind us, but we ourselves found
it impossible to stir, paralyzed as we were by the sight of the old
man's demoniacal delight. He was leaping to and fro over the turf,
holding up his fingers in the red sunset glare.

"Six!" he shrieked. "Six! and room for two more! Oh, it's a merry life I
lead! Flowers and fruit and love-making" (oh, how I cringed at that!),
"and now and then a little spice like this! But where is my pretty
Lucetta? Surely she was here a moment ago. How could she have vanished,
then, so quickly? I do not see her form amid the trees, there is no
trace of her presence upon the lawn, and if they search the house from
top to bottom and from bottom to top they will find nothing of her--no,
not so much as a print of her footstep or the scent of the violets she
so often wears tucked into her hair."

These last words, uttered in a different voice from the rest, gave the
clue to the whole situation. We saw, even while we all bounded forward
to the res