thoughts were all disordered and his mind in a whirl,--what consciousness he had left to him was centred in an effort to get away--away!--far away from the scene of murder and death,--away from the scent and trail of blood which seemed to infect and poison the very air! It was a calm and lovely night. The moon rode high, and there was a soft wind blowing in from the sea. Out over the waste of heaving water, where the moonbeams turned the small rippling waves to the resemblance of netted links of silver or steel, the horizon stretched sharply clear and definite, like a line drawn under the finished chapter of vision. There was a gentle murmur of the inflowing tide among the loose stones and pebbles fringing the beach,--but to Helmsley's ears it sounded like the miserable moaning of a broken heart,--the wail of a sorrowful spirit in torture. He went on and on, with no very distinct idea of where he was going,--he simply continued to walk automatically like one in a dream. He did not know the time, but guessed it must be somewhere about midnight. The road was quite deserted, and its loneliness was to him, in his present over-wrought condition, appalling. Desolation seemed to involve the whole earth in gloom,--the trees stood out in the white shine of the moon like dark shrouded ghosts waving their cerements to and fro,--the fields and hills on either side of him were bare and solitary, and the gleam of the ocean was cold and cheerless as a "Dead Man's Pool." Slowly he plodded along, with a thousand disjointed fragments of thought and memory teasing his brain, all part and parcel of his recent experiences,--he seemed to have lived through a whole history of strange events since the herb-gatherer, Matt Peke, had befriended him on the road,--and the most curious impression of all was that he had somehow lost his own identity for ever. It was impossible and ridiculous to think of himself as David Helmsley, the millionaire,--there was, there could be no such person! David Helmsley,--the real David Helmsley,--was very old, very tired, very poor,--there was nothing left for him in this world save death. He had no children, no friends,--no one who cared for him or who wanted to know what had become of him. He was absolutely alone,--and in the hush of the summer night he fancied that the very moon looked down upon him with a chill stare as though wondering why he burdened the earth with his presence when it was surely time for him to die!