moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have
been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop,
snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a
turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering
draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something
unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in
oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and
signaled for help to remove it.

"What is it? What has he got?" screamed Mary Smith in my ear. She must
have come running from the back of the house at the recent outburst of
racket. Her petticoats swirled; her red curls streamed (they were
shining with wet). She had certainly been outdoors already, as early as
it was, in the teeth of all this blow, and I was startled by the pale
anxiety of her look. "What is it? Who is there?" she cried again
shrilly.

"Nobody but Crump with my baggage," I cried back. "What's the matter?"

"Oh, Mr. Pendarves, haven't you seen them? They are both gone! I've
looked everywhere about the house. They were gone when I got up, and I
can't find them high or low!"

"You mean Captain Pendarves--and the other?"

She nodded, with terror-struck eyes on me; then, raising on tiptoe,
screamed painfully, with her mouth close to my ear (it was almost
impossible to hear otherwise): "He--your grandfather--has done it
before. He's always restless in a storm. He goes down to the shore
sometimes. I'm so afraid----" her look said the rest.

"Ask him--ask Crump; maybe he's seen them," she added in a shriek, as I
started to the carrier's help. It was but a few steps to the gate, yet I
reached it wet through, half blinded by sheets of water driven slantwise
in my face, and with the breath nearly beaten out of me. In the open,
thus, the storm seemed to increase tenfold in violence; it filled the
vast cloudy hollow of the sky with reverberating din; and I felt, or
fancied I felt, the solid ground shiver with the pounding of the waves
on the ledges along the Cat's Mouth.

Crump greeted me with a cheerful grin; he had all the seaman's tolerance
for the vagaries of the weather.

"Coming on to blow some, ain't it?" he remarked at the top of his lungs.
"Your old apple-tree's carried away--that one in the corner of the
orchard, I mean. I could see it as I came along by the upper road."

"Have you seen my grandfather anywhere about?" I shouted.

He could not ha