--she would go cook on a north-bound craft from Topmast Harbor,
as many a maid of our coast was doing. And by Heaven! thinks I, she
had.

Her mother's punt was gone from Whisper Cove.

"She've lied down there on the hills," my uncle protested, "t' cry an'
wait. Ye're not searchin', Dannie, as ye ought. She've _jus'_ lied
down, I tell ye," he whimpered, "t' wait."

'Twas not so, I thought.

"She've her mother's shame come upon her," says he, "an' she've hid."

I wished it might be so.

"Jus' lied down an' hid," he repeated.

"No, no!" says I. "She'd never weakly hide her head from this."

He eyed me.

"Not Judith!" I expostulated.

"She'd never bear her mother's shame, Dannie," says he. "She'd run
away an' hide. She--she--_told_ me so."

I observed my uncle: he was gone with the need of rum--exhausted and
unnerved: his face all pallid and splotched. 'Twas a ghastly thing to
watch him stump the gravelled walk of our garden in the gray light of
that day.

"Uncle Nicholas, sir," says I, for the moment forgetting the woe of
Judith's hapless state in this new alarm, "do you come within an' have
a dram."

"Ye're not knowin' _how_ t' search," he complained. "Ye're but a pack
o' dunderheads!"

"Come, sir!" I pleaded.

"Is ye been t' Skeleton Droch?" he demanded. "She've a habit o'
readin' there. No!" he growled, in a temper; "you isn't had the
_sense_ t' go t' Skeleton Droch."

"A dram, sir," I ventured, "t' comfort you."

"An' ye bide here, ye dunderhead!" he accused.

I put my hand on his shoulder: he flung it off. I took his arm: he
wrenched himself free in an indignant passion.

"Ye're needin' it, sir," says I.

"For God's sake, child!" he cried; "do you go find the maid an' leave
me be. God knows I've trouble enough without ye!"

The maid was not at Skeleton Droch: neither on the hills, nor in the
hiding-places of the valleys, nor lying broken on the ledges of the
cliffs, nor swinging in the sea beneath--nor was she anywhere on the
land of Twin Islands or in the waters that restlessly washed the
boundary of gray rock. 'Twas near evening now, and a dreary, angrily
windy time. Our men gathered from shore and inland barren--and there
was no Judith, nor cold, wet body of Judith, anywhere to be found.
'Twas unthinkingly whispered, then, that the maid had fled with John
Cather on the mail-boat: this on Tom Tulk's Head, in its beginning,
and swiftly passed from tongue to tongue. Being overwrought when