hought I'd never see her again." She fixed her dark eyes on Caius as
she spoke. "I was going to ask you, after I was dead and couldn't look
for her any more, if you'd keep on looking for her in the sea till you
found her. But I wish you'd go now and see if you couldn't fetch her
before I die."

"Yes, I will go," answered Caius suddenly.

The strong determination of his quick assent seemed to surprise even her
in whose mind there could be no rational cause for surprise.

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes, I mean it. I will go, Mrs. Day."

A moment more she paused, as if for time for full belief in his promise
to dawn upon her, and then, instead of letting him go, she rose up
quickly with mysterious looks and gestures. Her words were whispered:

"Come, then, and I'll show you the way. Come; you mustn't tell Day. Day
doesn't know anything about it." She had led him back to the door of the
house and gone out before him. "Come, I'll show you the way. Hush! don't
talk, or someone might hear us. Walk close to the barn, and no one will
see. I never showed anyone before but her when she came to me wearing
the gold ring. What are you so slow for? Come, I'll show you the way to
look for her."

Impelled by curiosity and the fear of increasing her excitement if he
refused, Caius followed her down the side of the open yard in which he
had once seen her stand in fierce quarrel with her husband. It had
seemed a dreary place then, when the three children swung on the gate
and neither the shadow of death nor madness hung over it; it seemed far
more desolate now, in spite of the bright summer sunlight. The barns and
stable, as they swiftly passed them, looked much neglected, and there
was not about the whole farmstead another man or woman to be seen. As
the mad woman went swiftly in front of him, Caius remembered, perhaps
for the first time in all these years, that after her husband had struck
her upon that night, she had gone up to the cowshed that was nearest the
sea, and that afterwards he had met her at the door of the root-house
that was in the bank of the chine. It was thither she went now, opening
the door of the cowshed and leading him through it to a door at the
other end, and down a path to this cellar cut in the bank.

The cellar had apparently been very little used. The path to it was well
beaten, but Caius observed that it ran past the cellar down the chine to
a landing where Day now kept a flat-bottomed boat. They stood on thi