into a nether region from which floated up great, shuddering
gasps of agony. He followed this idea more minutely, picturing the
details of such a terrestrial calamity; then he put it from him with
an oath. Black thoughts crept insidiously into his mind like rats in a
cellar. He had ordinarily a rigidly disciplined brain, an incisive
logic, and he was disturbed by the distorted visions that came to him
unbidden. He wished, in a momentary panic, instantly suppressed, that
he were safely away with Millie in the ketch.

He was becoming hysterical, he told himself with compressed lips--no
better than Lichfield Stope. The latter rose greyly in his memory, and
fled across the sea, a phantom body pulsing with a veined fire like
that stirred from the nocturnal bay. He again consulted his watch, and
said aloud, incredulously: "Five minutes past eight." The inchoate
crawling of his thoughts changed to an acute, tangible doubt, a
mounting dread.

He rehearsed the details of his plan, tried it at every turning. It
had seemed to him at the moment of its birth the best--no, the
only--thing to do, and it was still without obvious fault. Some
trivial happening, an unforeseen need of her father's, had delayed
Millie for a minute or two. But the minutes increased and she did not
appear. All his conflicting emotions merged into a cold passion of
anger. He would kill Nicholas without a word's preliminary. The time
drew out, Millie did not materialize, and his anger sank to the
realization of appalling possibilities.

He decided that he would wait no longer. In the act of moving forward
he thought he heard, rising thinly against the fluctuating wind, a
sudden cry. He stopped automatically, listening with every nerve, but
there was no repetition of the uncertain sound. As Woolfolk swiftly
considered it he was possessed by the feeling that he had not heard
the cry with his actual ear but with a deeper, more unaccountable
sense. He went forward in a blind rush, feeling with extended hands
for the opening in the tangle, groping a stumbling way through the
close dark of the matted trees. He fell over an exposed root,
blundered into a chill, wet trunk, and finally emerged at the side of
the desolate mansion. Here his way led through saw grass, waist high,
and the blades cut at him like lithe, vindictive knives. No light
showed from the face of the house toward him, and he came abruptly
against the bay window of the dismantled billiard room.