Hunt as he might, no sign could he find anywhere of the footsteps
walking FROM them.
He gave it up at last. Still keeping silence, he looked again at me; and
then he looked out at the waters before us, heaving in deeper and deeper
over the quicksand. I looked where he looked--and I saw his thought in
his face. A dreadful dumb trembling crawled all over me on a sudden. I
fell upon my knees on the beach.
"She has been back at the hiding-place," I heard the Sergeant say to
himself. "Some fatal accident has happened to her on those rocks."
The girl's altered looks, and words, and actions--the numbed, deadened
way in which she listened to me, and spoke to me--when I had found her
sweeping the corridor but a few hours since, rose up in my mind, and
warned me, even as the Sergeant spoke, that his guess was wide of the
dreadful truth. I tried to tell him of the fear that had frozen me up. I
tried to say, "The death she has died, Sergeant, was a death of her own
seeking." No! the words wouldn't come. The dumb trembling held me in its
grip. I couldn't feel the driving rain. I couldn't see the rising tide.
As in the vision of a dream, the poor lost creature came back before me.
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