t with a cry. "There!" she screamed frantically,
"they've come! they've come!"

A rabbit had run out into the moonlight before them, a gray fox had
dashed from the thicket into the wood, but nothing else.

"Who's come?" said Collinson, staring at her.

"The sheriff and his posse! They're surrounding them now. Don't you
hear?" she gasped.

There was a strange rattling in the direction of the mill, a dull
rumble, with wild shouts and outcries, and the trampling of feet on its
wooden platform. Collinson staggered to his feet; but at the same
moment he was thrown violently against his wife, and they both clung
helplessly to the tree, with their eyes turned toward the ledge. There
was a dense cloud of dust and haze hanging over it.

She uttered another cry, and ran swiftly towards the rocky grade.
Collinson ran quickly after her, but as she reached the grade he
suddenly shouted, with an awful revelation in his voice, "Come back!
Stop, Sadie, for God's sake!" But it was too late. She had already
disappeared; and as he reached the rock on which Chivers had leaped, he
felt it give way beneath him.

But there was no sound, only a rush of wind from the valley below.
Everything lapsed again into its awful stillness. As the cloud lifted
from where the mill had stood, the moon shone only upon empty space.
There was a singular murmuring and whispering from the woods beyond
that increased in sound, and an hour later the dry bed of the old
mill-stream was filled with a rushing river.

CHAPTER VIII.

Preble Key returned to his hotel from the convent, it is to be feared,
with very little of that righteous satisfaction which is supposed to
follow the performance of a good deed. He was by no means certain that
what he had done was best for the young girl. He had only shown himself
to her as a worldly monitor of dangers, of which her innocence was
providentially unconscious. In his feverish haste to avert a scandal,
he had no chance to explain his real feelings; he had, perhaps, even
exposed her thwarted impulses to equally naive but more dangerous
expression, which he might not have the opportunity to check. He
tossed wakefully that night upon his pillow, tormented with alternate
visions of her adorable presence at the hotel, and her bowed,
renunciating figure as she reentered the convent gate. He waited
expectantly the next day for the message she had promised, and which he
believed she would find some way to sen