“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” Harrison announced with determination as he led the search. Yet, from the very outset, that search was the most perfunctory and futile affair. The members of the party, two of whom stayed behind, exhibited a marked inclination not to separate. Outside, in the security of the moonlight and each other’s society, they had suffered mystification, wonder, perhaps an occasional thrill of apprehension, but not that peculiar quality of fear that lay in wait for them the moment they entered the gloom of the plantation. 2 Even Greatorex felt that influence. He had followed his host, in advance of the other three, but lost sight of him directly as he entered the cover of the trees. He started violently when a twig brushed his face, and then, with a just perceptible note of alarm in his voice, called out: “Hallo, Harrison! You there? It’s so infernally dark!” Harrison answered him with a remarkable promptitude. “Hallo, G.!” he said. “That you? I’m close here! I’ll wait for you.” They were as a matter of fact separated only by the spread of a single yew. “Don’t see that we stand much chance of catching the lady in a place like this, Harrison,” Greatorex remarked when they had joined company. “You might hide a platoon under these trees in this light, what?” “Only a narrow belt of it,” Harrison replied. “We’ll be through on to the shore of the lake in ten yards. We can see her then for half a mile if she’s come out.” “All right,” Greatorex agreed, and added in a mood of sudden confidence; “Beastly weird sort of place, this, but it’s been a weird sort of affair altogether.” “Mad woman,” commented Harrison with a touch of vehemence. “Queer, certainly,” Greatorex agreed. “But why did you say hoax, just now? You don’t think that...?” They had been talking in interrupted snatches as they pressed their way, keeping close together, through the stubborn resistance of the yews, but as Greatorex’s sentence trailed away with a suggestion of cutting off his own suspicions, they came out on to the long grass that bordered the lake. Harrison stopped, and gave a sigh that may have indicated his relief at getting clear from the intriguing opposition of the plantation. Before them was spread the placid deep of the black water, so calm and rigid that it looked like a sheet of unsoiled and faintly lustrous ice. To the right and left of them the bank ran in a flat curve, in full sight for a quarter of a mile each way, save that it was bordered by an uneven selvage of impenetrable black shadow. But nowhere was there any sign of a flitting white shape, escaping from the charges of hoax or insanity that had been brought against it. “Either got away or hiding in the plantation,” remarked Greatorex, after a pause during which with a suggestion of breathless eagerness the two men had searched the moonlit distances. The wreath of cirrus had cleared away now, and the moon had reached the perfect gold of its ultimate splendour.