“Good heavens!” I stammered, and struck at it blindly with my gunstock.  The ghastly thing flew into the air, whirling over and over, and rolled again down the sides of the pit to the bottom.  Breathlessly I stared at it, then, confused and scarcely comprehending, I stepped back from the pit, still facing it, one, ten, twenty paces, my eyes almost starting from my head, as though I expected to see the thing roll up from the bottom of the pit under my very gaze.  At last I turned my back to the pit and strode out across the gorse-covered moorland toward my home.  As I reached the road that winds from St. Gildas to St. Julien I gave one hasty glance at the pit over my shoulder.  The sun shone hot on the sod about the excavation.  There was something white and bare and round on the turf at the edge of the pit.  It might have been a stone; there were plenty of them lying about.

II

When I entered my garden I saw Mome sprawling on the stone doorstep.  He eyed me sideways and flopped his tail.

“Are you not mortified, you idiot dog?” I said, looking about the upper windows for Lys.

Mome rolled over on his back and raised one deprecating forepaw, as though to ward off calamity.

“Don’t act as though I was in the habit of beating you to death,” I said, disgusted.  I had never in my life raised whip to the brute.  “But you are a fool dog,” I continued.  “No, you needn’t come to be babied and wept over; Lys can do that, if she insists, but I am ashamed of you, and you can go to the devil.”

Mome slunk off into the house, and I followed, mounting directly to my wife’s boudoir.  It was empty.

“Where has she gone?” I said, looking hard at Mome, who had followed me.  “Oh!  I see you don’t know.  Don’t pretend you do.  Come off that lounge!  Do you think Lys wants tan-colored hairs all over her lounge?”

I rang the bell for Catherine and Fine, but they didn’t know where “madame” had gone; so I went into my room, bathed, exchanged my somewhat grimy shooting clothes for a suit of warm, soft knickerbockers, and, after lingering some extra moments over my toilet—­for I was particular, now that I had married Lys—­I went down to the garden and took a chair out under the fig-trees.

“Where can she be?” I wondered, Mome came sneaking out to be comforted, and I forgave him for Lys’s sake, whereupon he frisked.

“You bounding cur,” said I, “now what on earth started you off across the moor?  If you do it again I’ll push you along with a charge of dust shot.”

As yet I had scarcely dared think about the ghastly hallucination of which I had been a victim, but now I faced it squarely, flushing a little with mortification at the thought of my hasty retreat from the gravel pit.

“To think,” I said aloud, “that those old woman’s tales of Max Fortin and Le Bihan should have actually made me see what didn’t exist at all!  I lost my nerve like a schoolboy in a dark bedroom.”  For I knew now that I had mistaken a round stone for a skull each time, and had pushed a couple of big pebbles into the pit instead of the skull itself.