She locked her door securely, put the key in her pocket, and stole toward Sir Everard’s rooms.  Her kid slippers fell light as snow-flakes on the carpet.  She opened the baronet’s dressing-room door.  It had been his sleeping-room, too, of late.  His bed stood ready prepared; a lamp burned dimly on the dressing-table.  Beside the lamp Miss Silver placed her anonymous letter, then retreated as noiselessly as she had entered, shut the door, and glided stealthily down the corridor, down the stairs, along the passages, and out of the same door which my lady had passed not ten minutes previously.

Swift as a snake, and more deadly of purpose, Sybilla glided along the gloomy avenues of the wood toward the sea-side terrace.  Every nerve seemed strung like steel, every fiber of her body quivered to its utmost tension.  Her eyes blazed in the dark like the eyes of a wild cat; she looked like a creature possessed of a devil.

She reached the extremity of the woodland path almost as soon as her victim.  A moment she paused, glaring upon her with eyes of fiercest hate as she stood there alone and defenseless.  The next, she drew out the flashing stiletto.  Flung away the scabbard, and advanced with it in her hand and horrible words upon her lips.

“I swore by the Lord who made me I would murder you if you ever came again to meet that man!  False wife, accursed traitoress, meet your doom!”

There was a wild shriek.  In that fitful light she never doubted for a moment but that it was her husband.

“Have mercy!” she cried.  “I am innocent, Everard!  Oh, for God’s sake, do not murder me!”

“Wretch—­traitoress—­die.  You are not fit to pollute the earth longer!  Go to your grave with my hate and my curse!”

With a sudden paroxysm of mad fury the dagger was lifted—­one fierce hand gripped Harriet’s throat.  A choking shriek—­the dagger fell—­a gurgling cry drowned in her throat—­a fierce spurt of hot blood—­a reel backward and a heavy fall over the low iron railing—­down, down on the black shore beneath—­and the pallid moonlight gleaming above shone on one figure standing on the stone terrace, alone, with a dagger dripping blood in its hand.

She leaned over the rail.  Down below—­far down—­she could see a slender figure, with long hair blowing in the blast, lying awfully still on the sands.  Not five feet off the great waves washed, rising, steadily rising.  In five minutes more they would wash the feet of the terrace—­that slender figure would lie there no more.

“The fall alone would have killed her.  Before I am half-way back to the house those waves will be her shroud.”

She wrapped her cloak around her and fled away—­back, swift as the wind, into the house, up the stairs.  Safe in her own room, she tore off her disguise.  The cloak and the trousers were horribly spotted with blood.  She made all into one compact package, rolled up the dagger in the bundle, stole back to the baronet’s dressing-room and listened, and peeped through the key-hole.  He was not there; the room was empty.  She went in, thrust the bundle out of sight in the remotest corner of the wardrobe, and hastened back to her chamber.  Her letter still lay where she had left it.  The baronet bad not yet returned.