e darkening beach... it was none of these
things.

He began hurriedly to tell Charlotte about the Scarlet Admiral. Even as
he told her he was himself caught into the excitement of the narration.
He forgot her; he did not see her white cheeks, her mouth open with
terror, an expression new to her, that her face had never known before,
stealing into her eyes. He told her how the Fool had seen the ship,
how the Admiral had landed, then left his men on the beach, how he had
climbed the little green path, how the young man had followed him, how
they had fought, how the young man had fallen. What was that? Jeremy
jumped from his rock. "I say, did you hear anything?"

And that was enough for Charlotte. With one scream, a scream such as she
had never uttered in her life before, sue turned, and then, running
as indeed she had never run before, she stumbled, half fell, stumbled,
finally ran as though the whole world of her ghosts was behind her. Her
screams were so piercing that they may well have startled, the villagers
of Rafiel.

Jeremy followed her, but his mind was not with her. Was he going to see
something? What was it? Who was it?

Then the awful catastrophe that finished the afternoon occurred. Turning
the corner of the rock, Charlotte missed her footing and fell straight
into a pool. Jeremy, Mary and Helen were upon her almost as she fell.
They dragged her out, but alas! what a sight was there! Instead of the
beautiful and magnificent Charlotte there was a bedraggled and dirty
little girl.

But also, instead of an inanimate and lifeless doll, there was at last a
human being, a terrified soul.

The scene that followed passes all power of description. Mrs. Le Page
wailed like a lost spirit; Mr. Le Page was so rude to Mr. Cole that it
might confidently be said that those two gentlemen would never speak
to one another again. Mrs. Cole, dismayed though she was, had some
fatalistic consolation that she had known from the first that the picnic
would be a most dreadful failure and that the worst had occurred; there
was no more to come.

Everyone was too deeply occupied to scold Jeremy. They all moved up to
the farm, Charlotte behaving most strangely, even striking her mother
and crying: "Let me go! Let me go! I don't want to be clean! I'm
frightened! I'm frightened!"

Jeremy hung behind the others. At the bottom of the little lane he stood
and waited. Was there a figure coming up through the dusk? Did someone
pass him