tempest. Then all was quiet and dark again. She had slid
quickly out and the door had swung to behind her. Another instant and I
heard the click of the key as it turned in the lock, heard it and made no
outcry, such the spell, such the bewilderment of my faculties! But once
the act was accomplished and egress made difficult, nay, for the moment,
impossible, I felt all lesser emotions give way to an anxiety which
demanded immediate action, for the girl had gone out without wraps or
covering for her head, and my experience of the evening had told me how
cold it was. I must follow and find her and rescue her if possible from
the snow. The distance was long to town, the cold would seize and perhaps
prostrate her, after which, the wind and snow would do the rest.

Throwing myself against the door, I shook it violently. It was immovable.
Then I flew to the windows. Their fastenings yielded readily enough, but
not the windows themselves; one had a broken cord, another seemed glued
to its frame, and I was still struggling with the latter when I heard a
sound which lifted the hair on my head and turned my whole attention back
to what lay behind and above me. There was still some one in the house. I
had forgotten everything in this apparition of the woman I have described
in a place so disassociated with any conception I could possibly have of
her whereabouts on this especial evening. But this noise, short, sharp,
but too distant to be altogether recognisable, roused doubts which once
awakened changed the whole tenor of my thoughts and would not let me rest
till I had probed the house from top to bottom. To find Carmel Cumberland
alone in this desolation was a mystifying discovery to which I had found
it hard enough to reconcile myself. But Carmel here in company with
another at the very moment when I had expected the fruition of my own
joy,--ah, that was to open hell's door in my breast; a possibility too
intolerable to remain unsettled for an instant. Though she had passed out
before my eyes in a drooping, almost agonised condition, not she, dear as
she was, and great as were my fears in her regard, was to be sought out
first, but the man! The man who was back of all this, possibly back of my
disappointment; the man whose work I may have witnessed, but at whose
identity I could not even guess.

Leaving the window, I groped my way along the wall until I reached the
rack where the man's coat and hat hung. Whether it was my intent