gged herself back again. Before reaching the now dreaded spot
she met one of the men.

'We can see nothing at all, Miss,' he declared.

Having gained the beach, she found the tide in, and no sign of
Charley's clothes. The other men whom she had besought to come had
disappeared, it must have been in some other direction, for she had
not met them going away. They, finding nothing, had probably thought
her alarm a mere conjecture, and given up the quest.

Baptista sank down upon the stones near at hand. Where Charley had
undressed was now sea. There could not be the least doubt that he was
drowned, and his body sucked under by the current; while his clothes,
lying within high-water mark, had probably been carried away by the
rising tide.

She remained in a stupor for some minutes, till a strange sensation
succeeded the aforesaid perceptions, mystifying her intelligence, and
leaving her physically almost inert. With his personal disappearance,
the last three days of her life with him seemed to be swallowed up,
also his image, in her mind's eye, waned curiously, receded far away,
grew stranger and stranger, less and less real. Their meeting and
marriage had been so sudden, unpremeditated, adventurous, that she
could hardly believe that she had played her part in such a reckless
drama. Of all the few hours of her life with Charles, the portion that
most insisted in coming back to memory was their fortuitous encounter
on the previous Saturday, and those bitter reprimands with which he
had begun the attack, as it might be called, which had piqued her to
an unexpected consummation.

A sort of cruelty, an imperiousness, even in his warmth, had
characterized Charles Stow. As a lover he had ever been a bit of a
tyrant; and it might pretty truly have been said that he had stung
her into marriage with him at last. Still more alien from her life did
these reflections operate to make him; and then they would be chased
away by an interval of passionate weeping and mad regret. Finally,
there returned upon the confused mind of the young wife the
recollection that she was on her way homeward, and that the packet
would sail in three-quarters of an hour.

Except the parasol in her hand, all she possessed was at the station
awaiting her onward journey.

She looked in that direction; and, entering one of those
undemonstrative phases so common with her, walked quietly on.

At first she made straight for the railway; but suddenly turni