his finger half way down a certain column, added, "he thinks that's your man.”

Hector immediately took the paper, wished them good-night, and went to his room.

They never again beheld him. On the following morning his room was found empty-Joseph Kinley's lodger was gone!

CHAPTER VI.

THE BITTERN'S CRY.

WHAT was he meditating ?-whither going?

Apparently he began to ask himself such questions after some hours of hard walking, when he paused on the side of a hill; for he took a map from his pocket and spread it out upon the green carpet at his feet, and turning, lay upon his breast to examine it.

"All right, so far," he muttered. Then he traced with his finger the forward route to the place called Heronden, at which his finger stopped so long he felt the pulse beating in it.

He wondered whether anybody had ever been mad enough before to try such a road from Bletwich to Heronden as he was now pursuing. Up great precipices and then down, and the same

F

process many times repeated. Miles along the sea-beach, with rocks overhanging and seemingly ready to fall, as they had often fallen before and strewn the route with their débris. Past projecting corners and long incurving stretches of coast, where, if he had happened to come at the wrong moment, he might have been caught by the tide and swallowed up; then striking inland across country, through old-fashioned villages, where the sleepy people stared at his stern look, torn dress, and brilliant yet bloodshot eyes, and where he first stopped for refreshment, which no one was able or willing to give him, till at one hamlet an aged woman pitied his worn looks and brought him out a bowl of milk and a great slice of bread. This he began eagerly to devour, but turned from it presently with a sense of sickness, lay down on a bench, and in another minute was fast asleep.

On waking, Hector hurried on through the broad watery marshes that he saw stretching far

away before him-green land and dull watermingling to the eye into an inexplicable maze.

The darkness increased so fast that before he could have advanced a mile from the hamlet, he found it difficult to distinguish the ground from the water more than for a few yards before him. This made progress at once tedious, difficult, and dangerous.

Perpetually he would choose a path that led him straight into the water. He would

go back, choose another, and come again to a similar conclusion.

With an intense feeling of irritation that was often so great he could scarcely prevent himself from breaking into a fierce cry, he thus, after several minutes spent in movements to and fro, and in a supposed advance on the whole, found himself back again at the spot where he had been some time before-a spot that he knew by the stump of a broken willow-tree standing beside other willows.

He turned to look back, but could no longer recognise the route he had come.

Again he turned to the forward route, and could make out nothing but water and something that did not seem water, indicated here and there, mixed up with it.

He took out his map, but could not even see the faint lines of his route; so that, even if he were able to perceive the fixed objects that were marked in the map as guides for the wayfarer, they would do him no good now.

He gazed into the sky in a kind of mute appeal for moonlight, starlight, or for yet a brief return of the last rays of daylight, so that he might at least do something-make some effort—go back, or go forward.

The blank, lowering darkness of the sky was his only answer.

He sat down in the intense depression of his spirits, feeling it would not matter much if he

never more rose.