“If you do not come,” she said, “he will kill you!  He will sar-tain-ly kill you all!”

She nodded vehemently, and so, after another glance to right and left, beckoned to me once again.  Her face was white, almost as her muslin frock, and something in it persuaded me to climb over the verandah-rail and follow her.

About thirty yards from the corner of the house stood a clump of odorous laurels, the scent of which we had been inhaling while we sat at tea.  For these she broke away at a run, nor looked back until she was well within their shadow and I had overtaken her.

“Good boy!” she said, nodding again and smiling at me with her desperately anxious face.  “I would wish—­I would very much wish—­to kiss you.  But you mus’ not come a-near”—­she sighed—­“it is not healthy.  Only you come with me.  I dream of you, sometimes, all las’ night.  ‘What a pity!’ I dream, ‘and you so pe-ritty boy!’ Now you come with me, and I take you away so he never find you.”

The woman was evidently mad.

“Please tell me what you have to say,” I urged, “and let me go back.  They will be missing me in a minute or so.”

“If they miss you, it is no matter now.  He will kill them all, he is so strong . . . as he killed all those others . . . you remember?  See, now, pe-ritty boy, what I have done for you, to save you from him!  He shut me up, in his other house—­he has another house away up in the woods, beyond where we met.”  She waved a hand towards the hills.  “But I break out, and come here to save you.  He would kill me also, if he knew.”

Mad though I believed her, I was growing pretty thoroughly frightened, remembering the graveyard under the trees.  “You forget my friends,” said I, speaking very simply, as to a child.  “If he means to kill them, I ought to carry them warning.”

“He will not kill them till to-night,” she answered, shaking her head.  “It is always at night-time, when they are at supper.  There is no hurry, little boy; but he will sar-tain-ly kill them, all the same.”

I turned my head, preparing to run, for I heard Captain Branscome’s voice in the verandah, calling my name.

“They are starting after the treasure.  I must go,” I stammered.

She drew close, and laid a hand on my arm.  Again a dreadful odour was wafted under my nostrils—­an odour as of tuberoses, and I know not what of corruption—­and, as before in the graveyard, it turned me both sick and giddy.

“They will not find it,” she said, nodding with an air of childish triumph.  “Shall I tell you why? I have hidden it!” Here she fell back on her old litany.  “He would kill me if he knew . . .  I hid it—­oh, years ago!  But come, and I will show you; and you shall take a great deal—­yes, as much as you can carry—­if only you will go away, and never be rash again.”

A second time I heard Captain Branscome’s voice calling to me, demanding to know where I had disappeared.