in the fir-plantation, not walking, but running
in the direction of the sea-shore.

"Does this boy know the coast hereabouts?"
asked Sergeant Cuff.

"He has been born and bred on the coast,"
I answered.

"Duffy!" says the Sergeant, "do you want
to earn a shilling? If you do, come along with
me. Keep the pony-chaise ready, Mr.
Betteredge, till I come back."

He started for the Shivering Sand, at a rate
that my legs (though well enough preserved
for my time of life) had no hope of matching.
Little Duffy, as the way is with the young
savages in our parts when they are in high
spirits, gave a howl, and trotted off at the
Sergeant's heels.

Here again, I find it impossible to give anything
like a clear account of the state of my
mind in the interval after Sergeant Cuff had
left us. A curious and stupefying restlessness
got possession of me. I did a dozen different
needless things in and out of the house, not
one of which I can now remember. I don't
even know how long it was after the Sergeant
had gone to the sands, when Duffy came running
back with a message for me. Sergeant
Cuff had given the boy a leaf torn out of his
pocket-book, on which was written in pencil,
"Send me one of Rosanna Spearman's boots,
and be quick about it."

I despatched the first woman-servant I could
find to Rosanna's room; and I sent the boy back
to say that I myself would follow him with
the boot.

This, I am well aware, was not the quickest
way to take of obeying the directions which I
had received. But I was resolved to see for
myself what new mystification was going on,
before I trusted Rosanna's boot in the Sergeant's
hands. My old notion of screening the girl, if
I could, seemed to have come back on me again,
at the eleventh hour. This state of feeling (to
say nothing of the detective fever) hurried me
off, as soon as the boot was put in my hands,
at the nearest approach to a run which a man
turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.

As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered
black, and the rain came down, drifting in great
white sheets of water before the wind. I heard
the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the
mouth of the bay. A little further on, I passed
the boy crouching for shelter under the lee of
the sand-hills. Then I saw the raging sea, and
the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the
driven rain sweeping over the waters like a
flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the
beach with one solitary black figure standing on
it—the figure of Sergeant Cuff.

He waved his hand towards the north, when
he first saw me. "Keep on that side!" he
shouted. "  come on down here to me!"

I went down to him, choking for breath, with
my heart leaping as if it was like to leap out of
me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred
questions to put to him; and not one of them
would pass my lips. His face frightened me. I
saw a look in his eyes which was a look of
horror. He snatched the boot out of my hand,
and set it in a footmark on the sand, bearing
south from us as we stood, and pointing straight
towards the rocky ledge called the South Spit.
The mark was not yet blurred out by the rain—
and the girl's boot fitted it to a hair.

The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the foot-
mark, without saying a word.

I caught at his arm, and tried to speak to him,
and failed as I had failed when I tried before. He
went on, following the footsteps down and down
to where the rocks and the sand joined. The South
Spit was just awash with the flowing tide; the
waters heaved over the hidden face of the Shivering
Sand. Now this way and now that, with an
obstinate silence that fell on you like lead, with
an obstinate patience that was dreadful to see,.
Sergeant Cuff tried the boot in the footsteps,
and always found it pointing the same way—
straight to the rocks. Hunt as he might, no
sign could he find anywhere of the footsteps
walking from them.

He gave it up at last. He looked again at
me; and then he looked out at the waters before
us, heaving in deeper and deeper over the hidden
face of the Shivering Sand. I looked where he
looked—and I saw his thought in his face. A
dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on
a sudden. I fell upon my knees on the sand.

"She has been back at the hiding-place," I
heard the Sergeant say to himself. "Some fatal
accident has happened to her on those rocks."

The girl's altered looks, and words, and actions
—the numbed, deadened way in which she
listened to me, and spoke to me—when I had
found her sweeping the corridor but a few
hours since, rose up in my mind, and warned
me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his
guess was wide of the dreadful truth. I
tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me
up. I tried to say, "The death she has died,
Sergeant, was a death of her own seeking."
No! the words wouldn't come. The dumb
trembling held me in its grip. I couldn't feel
the driving rain. I couldn't see the rising tide.
As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature
came back before me. I saw her again as
I had seen her in the past time—on the morning
when I went to fetch her into the house. I heard
her again, telling me that the Shivering Sand
seemed to draw her to it against her will, and
wondering whether her grave was waiting for
her there. The horror of it struck at me, in some
unfathomable way, through my own child. My
girl was just her age. My girl, tried as Rosanna
was tried, might have lived that miserable
life, and died this dreadful death.

The Sergeant kindly lifted me up, and turned
me away from the sight of the place where she
had perished.

With that relief, I began to fetch my breath
again, and to see things about me, as things
really were. Looking towards the sand-hills, I
saw the men-servants from out-of-doors, and the
fisherman named Yolland, all running down to us
together, and all, having taken the alarm, calling