here, beyond the Keep--"

"Is the Keep that high square tower amongst the woods?" asked
Copplestone.

"That's it--it's all that's left of the old castle," answered Mrs.
Wooler. "Well, off the point beneath that, there's a group of
rocks--you'd perhaps noticed them as you came down from the station?
They've various names--there's the King, the Queen, the Sugar-Loaf, and
so on. At low tide you can walk across to them. And of course, some
people like to climb them. Now, they're particularly dangerous! On the
Queen rock there's a great hole called the Devil's Spout, up which the
sea rushes. Everybody wants to look over it, you know, and if a man was
there alone, and his foot slipped, and he fell, why--"

Stafford came back, looking more cast down than ever.

"They've heard nothing there," he announced. "Come on--we'll go down and
see if we can hear anything from any of the people. We'll call in and see
you later, Mrs. Wooler, and if you can make any inquiries in the
meantime, do. Look here," he went on, when he and Copplestone had got
outside, "you take this south side of the bay, and I'll take the north.
Ask anybody you see--any likely person--fishermen and so on. Then come
back here. And if we've heard nothing--"

He shook his head significantly, as he turned away, and Copplestone,
taking the other direction, felt that the manager's despondency was
influencing himself. A sudden disappearance of this sort was surely not
to be explained easily--nothing but exceptional happenings could have
kept Bassett Oliver from the scene of his week's labours. There must have
been an accident--it needed little imagination to conjure up its easy
occurrence. A too careless step, a too near approach, a loose stone, a
sudden giving way of crumbling soil, the shifting of an already detached
rock--any of these things might happen, and then--but the thought of what
might follow cast a greyer tint over the already cold and grey sea.

He went on amongst the old cottages and fishing huts which lay at the
foot of the wooded heights on the tops of whose pines and firs the gaunt
ruins of the old Keep seemed to stand sentinel. He made inquiry at open
doors and of little groups of men gathered on the quay and by the
drawn-up boats--nobody knew anything. According to what they told him,
most of these people had been out and about all the previous afternoon;
it had been a particularly fine day, that Sunday, and they had all been
out of doors, on th