rey had escaped the leash and run into its dim recesses
and would not come out at my call. As I needed him immediately for the
hunt, I followed him over the promontory and, swallowing my repugnance,
slid into the grotto to get him. Better a plunge to my death from the
height of the rocks towering above it. For there in a remote corner,
lighted up by a reflection from the sea, I beheld my setter crouched
above an object which in another moment I recognized as my dead
wife's missing slipper. Here! Not in the waters of the sea or in the
interstices of the rocks outside, but here! Proof that she had never
walked back to the house where she was found lying quietly in her bed;
proof positive; for I knew the path too well and the more than usual
tenderness of her feet.

"How then, did she get there; and by whose agency? Was she living when
she went, or was she already dead? A year had passed since that delicate
shoe had borne her from the boat into these dim recesses; but it might
have been only a day, so vividly did I live over in this moment of awful
enlightenment all the events of the hour in which we sat there playing
for the possession of our child. Again I saw her gleaming eyes, her
rosy, working mouth, her slim, white hand, loaded with diamonds,
clutching the cards. Again I heard the lap of the sea on the pebbles
outside and smelt the odour of the wine she had poured out for us both.
The bottle which had held it; the glass from which she had drunk lay now
in pieces on the rocky floor. The whole scene was mine again and as I
followed the event to its despairing close, I seemed to see my own wild
figure springing away from her to the grotto's mouth and so over the
rocks. But here fancy faltered, caught by a quick recollection to which
I had never given a thought till now. As I made my way along those
rocks, a sound had struck my ear from where some stunted bushes made
a shadow in the moonlight. The wind might have caused it or some small
night creature hustling away at my approach; and to some such cause
I must at the time have attributed it. But now, with brain fired by
suspicion, it seemed more like the quick intake of a human breath. Some
one had been lying there in wait, listening at the one loophole in the
rocks where it was possible to hear what was said and done in the heart
of the grotto. But who? who? and for what purpose this listening; and to
what end did it lead?

"Though I no longer loved even the memory of