road
ran, and watching the bats that often circled in the dark-blue dusk
overhead. Thus going on, he gradually recognised a little group walking
in front of him. It was the woman, Mrs. Day, and her three children.
Holding a child by either hand, she tramped steadily forward. Something
in the way she walked, in the way the children walked--a dull,
mechanical action in their steps--perplexed Caius.

He stepped up beside them with a word of neighbourly greeting.

The woman did not answer for some moments; when she did, although her
words were ordinary, her voice seemed to Caius to come from out some far
distance whither her mind had wandered.

"Going to call on someone, I suppose, Mrs. Day?" said he, inwardly
anxious.

"Yes," she replied; "we're going to see a friend--the children and me."

Again it seemed that there was some long distance between her and the
young man who heard her.

"Come along and see my mother," he urged, with solicitude. "She always
has a prime welcome for visitors, mother has."

The words were hearty, but they excited no heartiness of response.

"We've another place to go to to-night," she said. "There'll be a
welcome for us, I reckon."

She would neither speak to him any more nor keep up with his pace upon
the road. He slackened speed, but she still shrank back, walking slower.
He found himself getting in advance, so he left her.

A hundred yards more he went on, and looked back to see her climbing the
log fence into the strip of common beside the sea.

His deliberation of mind was instantly gone. Something was wrong now. He
cast himself over the low log fence just where he was, and hastened back
along the edge of the cliff, impelled by unformulated fear.

It was dark, the dark grayness of a moonless night. The cliff here was
not more than twenty feet above the high tide, which surged and swept
deep at its base. The grass upon the top was short; young fir-trees
stood here and there. All this Caius saw. The woman he could not see at
first. Then, in a minute, he did see her--standing on the edge of the
bank, her form outlined against what light there was in sea and sky. He
saw her swing something from her. The thing she threw, whatever it was,
was whirled outwards, and then fell into the sea. With a splash, it
sank.

The young man's mind stood still with horror. The knowledge came to him
as he heard the splash that it was the little child she had flung away.
He threw off his basket an