tood for a moment at
pause before stepping out upon the footbridge and into the moonlight.

The water at my feet, scarcely seen through the dark ferns, ran
swiftly and without noise as through a trough channelled in the
living rock; but it brought its impetus from a cascade that hummed
aloft somewhere in the darkness with a low continuous thunder as of a
mill with a turning wheel. I lifted my head to the sound, and in
that instant my ears caught a slight creak from the footbridge on my
left. I faced about, and stood rigid, at gaze. A woman was stepping
across the bridge, there in the moonlight; a slight figure, cloaked
and hooded and hurrying fast; a woman, with a gun slung behind her
and the barrel of it glimmering. It was the Princess.

I let her pass, and as she turned the bend of the road I stole out to
the footbridge and across it in pursuit. I knew now that the two
wayfarers had not been phantoms of my dreaming; that she was
following, tracking them, and that I must track and follow her.
Beyond the bend the road twisted over a low-lying spur of the
mountain between outcrops of reddish-coloured rock, and then ran
straight for almost three hundred yards, with olive orchards on
either hand; so that presently I could follow and hold her in sight,
myself keeping well within the trees' line of shadow.

Twice she turned to look behind her, but rapidly and as if in no
great apprehension of pursuit; or perhaps her own quest had made her
reckless. At the end of this straight and almost level stretch the
road rose steeply to wind over another foot-hill, and here she broke
into a run. I pressed after her up the ascent, and from the knap of
it, with a shock, found myself looking down at close hand upon a
small dim bay of the sea with a white edge of foam curving away into
a loom of shore above which a solitary light twinkled. The road,
following the curve of the shore a few paces above the waves, lay
bare in the moonlight, without cover to right or left, until, a mile
away perhaps, it melted into the grey of night. Along that distance
my eyes sought and sought in vain for the figure that had been
running scarcely two hundred yards ahead of me. The Princess had
disappeared.

For a short while I stood at fault; but searching the bushes on my
left, I was aware of a parting between them, overgrown indeed, yet
plainly indicating a track; along which I had pushed but two-score of
paces--perhaps less--before a light gl