in the Alps. In the blackness of the hazy
light from the sky, and the vague tossing of the candle behind him, he
saw that the hammock in which Frank so often lay was tenanted. A gleam
of white shirt was there, as if a man sitting up in it, but across that
there was an obscure dark shadow, and as he approached the acrid odor
grew more intense.

He was now only some few yards away, when suddenly the black shadow
seemed to jump into the air, then came down with tappings of hard hoofs
on the brick path that ran down the pergola, and with frolicsome
skippings galloped off into the bushes. When that was gone Darcy could
see quite clearly that a shirted figure sat up in the hammock. For one
moment, from sheer terror of the unseen, he hung on his step, and the
servant joining him they walked together to the hammock.

It was Frank. He was in shirt and trousers only, and he sat up with
braced arms. For one half-second he stared at them, his face a mask of
horrible contorted terror. His upper lip was drawn back so that the gums
of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focused not on the two who
approached him but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were
widely expanded, as if he panted for breath, and terror incarnate and
repulsion and deathly anguish ruled dreadful lines on his smooth cheeks
and forehead. Then even as they looked the body sank backwards, and the
ropes of the hammock wheezed and strained.

Darcy lifted him out and carried him indoors. Once he thought there was
a faint convulsive stir of the limbs that lay with so dead a weight in
his arms, but when they got inside, there was no trace of life. But the
look of supreme terror and agony of fear had gone from his face, a boy
tired with play but still smiling in his sleep was the burden he laid on
the floor. His eyes had closed, and the beautiful mouth lay in smiling
curves, even as when a few mornings ago, in the meadow by the weir, it
had quivered to the music of the unheard melody of Pan's pipes. Then
they looked further.

Frank had come back from his bath before dinner that night in his usual
costume of shirt and trousers only. He had not dressed, and during
dinner, so Darcy remembered, he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt
to above the elbow. Later, as they sat and talked after dinner on the
close sultriness of the evening, he had unbuttoned the front of his
shirt to let what little breath of wind there was play on his skin. The
sleeves were roll