I went to the top of the back staircase, descended a few steps, and looked over. The gardener and Sam were carrying between them a door, on which something was lying covered by a sheet. The cook opened the study-door, and they took it in. A horrible dread filled my mind and kept me powerless for a few moments. Then I ran along the corridor, down the front staircase, and met little Haidee with awe on her childish face. “Oh, Miss Christie,” she whispered, clutching my arm in terror, “they’ve found papa!” Jane ran forward and caught me as I tottered in the child’s clasp. Before I had recovered sufficiently to go to Mrs. Rayner in the drawing-room, Laurence and Mrs. Manners arrived, having heard the ghastly news already. They took us over to the Vicarage at once, and I never entered the Alders again. In the evening Laurence told me all about the discovery. The gardener, who had done little work for the last few days beyond keeping the gate locked and driving away with a whip the boys who would swarm over when they got a chance, “just to have a look at the place,” had been attracted that morning by the shrill cries of Mona, who, now more neglected than ever, spent all day in the garden in spite of the fog. He ran to the pond, where she was nearly always to be found, and whence her cries came, fearing she had fallen in. But he found her standing in the mud on the edge of it, screaming, “Come out, come out!” and clutching with a stick at an object in the water. It was the body of her father, entangled among the reeds. The down-trodden grasses and rushes at that corner of the pond nearest to the stile which joined the path through the plantation to the path through the field beyond told the story of how he must have missed his way coming through the plantation in the dense fog of Wednesday night, on his way back from the Hall to the Alders, slipped into the pond, and been drowned out there in the fog and darkness, while his dog Nap, hearing his cry for help, had tried in vain, by howling and barking, to draw attention to his master’s need. It was an awful thing that night to lie awake in my strange room at the Vicarage, and picture to myself the dead Mr. Rayner lying at the Alders, the sole occupant, with the exception of the woman hired to watch by him, of the big dreary house where he, with his love of fun and laughter, had seemed to me to be the one ray of brightness.