We went straight up to our room. Paxton was there, reading quite peaceably. “Ready to come out shortly?” said Long, “say in half-an-hour’s time?” “Certainly,” he said: and I said we would change first, and perhaps have baths, and call for him in half-an-hour. I had my bath first, and went and lay down on my bed, and slept for about ten minutes. We came out of our rooms at the same time, and went together to the sitting-room. Paxton wasn’t there--only his book. Nor was he in his room, nor in the downstair rooms. We shouted for him. A servant came out and said: “Why, I thought you gentlemen was gone out already, and so did the other gentleman. He heard you a-calling from the path there, and run out in a hurry, and I looked out of the coffee-room window, but I didn’t see you. ’Owever, he run off down the beach that way.” Without a word we ran that way too--it was the opposite direction to that of last night’s expedition. It wasn’t quite four o’clock, and the day was fair, though not so fair as it had been, so there was really no reason, you’d say, for anxiety: with people about, surely a man couldn’t come to much harm. But something in our look as we ran out must have struck the servant, for she came out on the steps, and pointed, and said, “Yes, that’s the way he went.” We ran on as far as the top of the shingle bank, and there pulled up. There was a choice of ways: past the houses on the sea-front, or along the sand at the bottom of the beach, which, the tide being now out, was fairly broad. Or of course we might keep along the shingle between these two tracks and have some view of both of them; only that was heavy going. We chose the sand, for that was the loneliest, and someone _might_ come to harm there without being seen from the public path. Long said he saw Paxton some distance ahead, running and waving his stick, as if he wanted to signal to people who were on ahead of him. I couldn’t be sure: one of these sea-mists was coming up very quickly from the south. There was someone, that’s all I could say. And there were tracks on the sand as of someone running who wore shoes; and there were other tracks made before those--for the shoes sometimes trod in them and interfered with them--of someone not in shoes. Oh, of course, it’s only my word you’ve got to take for all this: Long’s dead. We’d no time or means to make sketches or take casts, and the next tide washed everything away. All we could do was to notice these marks as we hurried on. But there they were over and over again, and we had no doubt whatever that what we saw was the track of a bare foot, and one that showed more bones than flesh.