In an instant she was off her horse and eagerly grasping at a glittering speck amid the grass. It was a chain--a gold watch-chain with a curious coin attached, which she knew well. She had often playfully noticed the female face upon it. Here it was. She held it to the light. A part was dimmed and mud-encrusted. It had been trodden into the earth, but since washed by the rain. And what was the stain, dark red across the gold? '_His_ chain--Lance Trevanion's chain!' she murmured to herself. 'How did it come here? Of course he may have dropped it. I'll run these tracks a bit. It looks as if--as if--but no! surely, it can't--_can't have been_. Oh, my God! they never could have _murdered him_!' As she muttered to herself, in disjointed and broken sentences, she led her horse along the narrow track, searching eagerly for the signs of passage or conflict--tokens that lie clearer than the printed page to the vision of the Children of the Waste. Yes! there _were_ footmarks, deeply indented in places, as of men that bore a burden. Here was a fragment of a check shirt of the pattern the bush labourer mostly wears, there a scrap of paper; and at a turn in the thicket-bordered path a long-abandoned shaft came into view. Lower she bent, and lower still, scanned yet more earnestly the slight mark of impress, invisible save to eyesight keen as those of the wild tribes which had been wont to roam these lonely wastes. 'The grass is longer here,' she whispered to herself in low and ghastly tones. 'Something's been _dragged_ this way; the edge of the shaft looks broken down. Oh, my God! poor Lance, poor fellow, is this what you've come to after all?' With stern set lips and eyes dry yet burning with deep unsparing hate, she secured her horse to a sapling. Then lying flat upon the earth, leaned over the edge of the dark unfathomed pit, and gazed into its depths, half dreading what her boding fears had shaped. She called too, at first brokenly, then loudly on him by name--'but none answered.' The tree limbs they had cast down had been lately dragged a few paces. The recent mark did not escape her watchful eye. As she looked heavenward in her despair she caught sight of a soaring eagle. On an adjacent tree sat a detachment of crows; she knew too well what their presence portended.