Together they hurried down the stairs, and through the dining-room where
an orderly table for breakfast had already been laid, and out on to the
terrace. The rain for the moment had been utterly stayed, as if the tap
of the heavens had been turned off, and under the lowering black sky,
not quite dark, since the moon rode somewhere serene behind the
conglomerated thunder-clouds, Darcy stumbled into the garden, followed
by the servant with the candle. The monstrous leaping shadow of himself
was cast before him on the lawn; lost and wandering odors of rose and
lily and damp earth were thick about him, but more pungent was some
sharp and acrid smell that suddenly reminded him of a certain châlet in
which he had once taken refuge in the Alps. In the blackness of the hazy
light from the sky, and the vague tossing of the candle behind him, he
saw that the hammock in which Frank so often lay was tenanted. A gleam
of white shirt was there, as if a man sitting up in it, but across that
there was an obscure dark shadow, and as he approached the acrid odor
grew more intense.

He was now only some few yards away, when suddenly the black shadow
seemed to jump into the air, then came down with tappings of hard hoofs
on the brick path that ran down the pergola, and with frolicsome
skippings galloped off into the bushes. When that was gone Darcy could
see quite clearly that a shirted figure sat up in the hammock. For one
moment, from sheer terror of the unseen, he hung on his step, and the
servant joining him they walked together to the hammock.

It was Frank. He was in shirt and trousers only, and he sat up with
braced arms. For one half-second he stared at them, his face a mask of
horrible contorted terror. His upper lip was drawn back so that the gums
of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focused not on the two who
approached him but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were