e-returning walker
shiver through evergreen glooms along shore. The lights of the sleepy
Old Mission had never seemed so pleasant, though the house was full of
talk about that day's accident at the other side of the island.

I slipped out before the early boat left next morning, driven by
undefined anxieties towards Madame Clementine's alley. There is a
childish credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I
had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way
which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who
sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The
intrusion of an accident to a stranger at another hotel continued this
morning, for as I took the long way around the bay before turning back
to Clementine's alley I met the open island hearse, looking like a relic
of provincial France, and in it was a coffin, and behind it moved a
carriage in which a black maid sat weeping.

Madame Clementine came out to her palings and picked some of her
nasturtiums for me. In her mixed language she talked excitedly about
the accident; nothing equals the islander's zest for sensation after his
winter trance when the summer world comes to him.

"When I heard it," I confessed, "I thought of the friend of your blue
gentleman. The description was so like her. But I saw her myself on the
beach by the Giant's Stairway after four o'clock yesterday."

Madame Clementine contracted her short face in puzzled wrinkles.

"There is one gentleman of red head," she responded, "but none of
blue--pas du tout."

"You must know whom I mean--the lodger who has been with you thirty-five
years."

She looked at me as at one who has either been tricked or is attempting
trickery.

"I don't know his name--but you certainly understand! The man I saw in
that room at the foot of the stairs when you were showing my friend and
me the chambers day before yesterday."

"There was nobody. De room at de foot of de stair is empty all season.
Tout de suite I put in some young lady that arrive this night."

"Madame Clementine, I saw a man with a blue skin on the beach
yesterday--" I stopped. He had not told me he lodged with her. That was
my own deduction. "I saw him the day before in this house. Don't you
know any such person? He has been on the island since that young lady
was brought to your house with the cholera so long ago. He brought her
to you."

A flicker of recollection ap