There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy.  Poppy was sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the night.  Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as pads in hair-dressers’ windows.  Roger was kneeling before her, his head on her lap, and weeping bitterly.  She was stroking his hair kindly enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the breakfast-table.  The French window was swinging open, admitting air that had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins.  She hovered about the threshold and heard the old man saying:  “‘Tes no question o’ you putting yourselves about to look for her now.  Mostly you don’t hear nothin’ of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went in.  Till the tide brings them back you can’t fetch them.”  Richard said:  “Yes, yes,” and held out money to him.  She saw he wanted to send the fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it were a law, that one must not betray emotion.  His inhibited hand became more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture of dismissal.  To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her wildness of loose hair and called:  “Richard!  Richard!”

That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped back into the room.  He evaded her embrace.  “This ghastly light!” he muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric switch.  Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her hands.

“My dear, my dear, what has happened?”

“There’s a place ... there’s a place ... there’s a place on the sea-wall....”  He drew his hand across his forehead.  “He is finding it difficult,” her heart told her sadly, “to explain it to a stranger.”  “In the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the right of the railway ... deserted....  A trolley-line runs from there over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty.  It hasn’t been used for years.  The planks are half of them rotted away.  The high tide runs right up among the piers.  We found her lantern down there on the mud.”

Her heart sickened.  “Oh, poor, poor Marion!” she wept, and asked foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story, “But when did you find the lantern?”

“An hour ago.  We looked for her last night till two.  We went all the way along to Canfleet.  They took us in at the signal-box there.  Then as soon as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall.  And we found the lantern.  Look, it’s out on the lawn.”

They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any moment it might move or speak.