Constance closed her escritoire with trembling hands, and went, in alarm, to the windows which faced the sea. The sun, we have said, had long since set, and athwart the dim and black and stormy clouds that now hid the point of his departure, a torrent of rain was falling aslant upon the dark and foam-flecked sea, and would ere long be drenching all the rocky shore. A little time and all should be darkness, and where was the absent Sybil? Close-hauled, and running fast before the blast for shelter in Portquin Bay, a large boat, the last, perhaps, of the autumn pilchard fishers, careening wildly over amid the foam, was seen to vanish round a promontory. A sudden access of terror now seized the heart of Constance. Instantly a mounted servant was dispatched to the hut of the widow, and the man soon came galloping back, with a scared visage and the tidings that Miss Devereaux had left her more than three hours ago, and had certainly descended to the beach, as she had been seen to do so. By this time, darkness had fairly set in; rain was falling fast upon the bleak coast, and "sowing wide the pathless main," while a heavy gale from thence was dashing a flood tide upon the shore, and the soul of Constance grew sick with apprehension. "The tide in! oh my God--in what can I have offended Thee to be punished thus? My Sybil--my Sybil--is the cup of my bitterness to be filled to overflowing!" she exclaimed, in a low voice as she sank upon a sofa, while Winny Braddon wrung her hands, and in the noisy grief peculiar to her class, lamented, as already said, "the darling _chealveen_" she had nursed in her bosom. Constance would have gone forth in person to search, bleak and rainy though the night; but she was too feeble and delicate to face the storm, nor would Nurse Braddon permit her. She sent all her servants, male and female, in search of the tidings she was terrified to hear; and ever and anon she rushed to the front portico and looked out upon the gloomy night, to where away beyond the willow groves that grew around the villa, the bleak high road wound seaward over a bare Cornish moor, towards those clumps of old trees that crowned the rocks which overlooked the fatal Pixies' Hole. Slowly, as if each were an eternity of time, hour after hour passed now--periods filled up by agony and the pulsations of her heart; and ere long her watch told her that midnight was nigh. Midnight, and her child still absent--her Sybil, the mistress of a thousand pretty, winning and affectionate ways!