If Richard Pellet had come down, which Harry now very much doubted, he must, as the waiter had suggested, have gone into the town, and Harry now repented that he had not at once hurried on there, and made inquiries. For, though he kept scouting the idea as absurd, and telling himself that his stepfather had some other reason for coming down here, his imagination was full of horrors suggested by his memory of destroyed directions and cards, and of men who had sought hotels in remote places to do some deed which should only produce an inquest on the body of a man unknown, unrecognised, unclaimed, so that the memory of the horror might soon pass away, and relatives only know that one of their family was missing. His fears must though, he felt, be groundless, for Richard Pellet, wealthy, prosperous, was not the man to make an end of his life; but then he might not after all be prosperous; his affairs might be in a hopeless state of confusion; and now this strange connection with the woman at his side might have urged him to flight or the commission of the crime at which she had hinted. But might not the woman be deceiving him? A glance, though, at the anxious, pallid face at his side, showed him plainly enough that even if she believed not the words she had uttered, she was moved by some strong impulse to overtake his stepfather; and, after all, what she had whispered might be true. At last he determined to speak--to question her; but it was in vain, for he could obtain no answer. In fact, she had, in her eagerness to overtake the man whom she believed to have her child, forgotten the ruse that she had used to set Harry in search of his stepfather. It was the half insane prompting of her fevered brain; but as soon as her object was effected, it was entirely forgotten--crushed out of her memory by the intense desire to overtake him. Richard Pellet and her child: there seemed room for nothing else in her thoughts; and once only had she spoken to Harry during the last quarter of an hour of their watch, and then only to inquire whether there was any other boat, and when answered in the negative, she relapsed into her former silence. The night darker than ever, a star now and then appearing, but only to be directly blotted out by some dense cloud; whenever a light patch of sky was visible low down on the horizon, the interlacing rigging and masts of the few vessels about could be seen rocking to and fro, while the steamer lights rose and fell in a way that betokened rough weather in the Channel. In the intervals of the squalls, too, would be heard the long, low roar of the sea, breaking upon the beach below the chalk cliffs that towered away to the west, or round by the sandy bay by Seaford. Waves rose, too, and washed with a heavy dash against the pier at the harbour entrance; and more than once Harry had heard it hinted that the steamer would not put to sea in such weather.