But to lie there perishing within almost rifle-shot of the roof under which he was born--so near his friends and so many who loved him--Annot more than all--was a terrible conviction--one apparently unnatural, unrealizable! The mist had gone now, and the dark rocks between which he lay began to assume strange and gruesome forms in the weird light of the occasional stars, still more so when once or twice a weird glimpse of the stormy moon penetrated into the Cleugh. 'Oh, God!' cried he imploringly, 'to perish--to perish thus!' At that moment, in a swiftly passing gleam of moonshine, he saw a face--a human face--peering over the rocks above as if seeking to penetrate the watery gloom below, and again a cry for help--help for the sake of mercy, for the sake of Heaven, escaped him. For a moment, we say, the face was there; the next it vanished, as a dark mass of cloud swept over the silver disc of the moon, and a sound, painfully and unmistakably like a mocking laugh, reached the ears of the sufferer. The face--if face it actually was--and not that of the fabled fiend, the Kelpie of the Cleugh, appeared no more; the hours went by; no succour came, and Roland, as he now resigned himself to the worst, believed that what he had seen, or thought he had seen, was but the creation of his own fevered and over-excited fancy. CHAPTER XXXI. 'ALL OVER NOW!' But it was no delirious delusion of Roland's that he had seen a human face, or heard a human voice respond mockingly to his despairing cry for aid. It singularly chanced that about an hour before midnight, and during a lull in the storm, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who--as we have said--had been seen hovering about the vicinity of Earlshaugh, was betaking himself thither, intent on seeing his sister, the mistress thereof (whom he also deemed his banker) concerning some of his monetary affairs, and had been passing on foot by the narrow sheep-path that skirted the verge of the dangerous Cleugh, when the occasional cries of the sufferer reached his ear, and on peering down he had speedily discovered by his voice _who_ that sufferer was. He paused for a minute till quite assured of the fact, and though at a loss to conceive how the event had come to pass, he proceeded with quickened steps for some miles, till he reached the private entrance--for which he had a key--but not for the purpose of raising an alarm, or procuring or sending forth succour. Of that he had not the least intention, as we shall show. 'In the place where the tree falleth, there let it lie,' was the text of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe just then. He found the entire household on the _qui vive_, and heard that Roland Lindsay was missing, thus corroborating to the fullest extent any detail that might be wanting, and obviating all doubt as to the episode at the Cleugh. 'What a fuss,' said he mockingly, 'about a storm of rain!'