my own coat while I fetched help.  But when I stooped down a deadly faintness came over me.  My fingers were palsied with horror.  I had a sudden irresistible conviction I could not touch him.  It was a sheer impossibility.  There was something between us more potent than the dread of a dead man—­something inimical between us two, the dead and the living.  I staggered away and ran reeling to the road, plunging blindly through the creek.

“About two hundred yards further down the road was a small lodge at one of the entrances of Rowchester.  It was towards this I turned and ran.  The door was closed, and I beat upon it fiercely with clenched fists.  The woman who answered it stared at me strangely.  I suppose that I was a wild-looking object.

“It’s Mr. Ducaine, isn’t it?” she exclaimed.  “Why, sakes alive! what’s wrong, sir?”

“A dead man in the marshes,” I faltered.

She was interested enough, but her comely weather-hardened face reflected none of the horror which she must have seen on mine.

“Lordy me! whereabouts, sir?” she inquired.

I pointed with a trembling forefinger.  She stood by my side on the threshold of the cottage and shaded her eyes with her hand, for the glare of the sun was dazzling.

“Well, I never did!” she remarked.  “But I said to John last night that I pitied them at sea.  He’s been washed up by the tide, I suppose, and I count there’ll be more before the day’s out.  A year come next September there was six of ’em, gentlefolk, too, who’d been yachting.  Eh, but it’s a cruel thing is the sea.”

“Where is your husband?” I asked.

“Up chopping wood in Fernham Spinney,” she answered.  “I’d best send one of the children for him.  He’ll have a cart with him.  Will you step inside, sir?”

I shook my head and answered her vaguely.  She sent a boy with a message, and brought me out a chair, dusting it carefully with her apron.

“You’d best sit down, sir.  You look all struck of a heap, so to speak.  Maybe you came upon it sudden.”

I was glad enough to sit down, but I answered her at random.  She re-entered the cottage and continued some household duties.  I sat quite still, with my eyes steadily fixed upon a dark object a little to the left of those white palings.  Above my head a starling in a wicker cage was making an insane cackling, on the green patch in front a couple of tame rabbits sat and watched me, pink-eyed, imperturbable.  Inside I could hear the slow ticking of an eight-day clock.  The woman was humming to herself as she worked.  All these things, which my senses took quick note of and retained, seemed to me to belong to another world.  I myself was under some sort of spell.  My brain was numb with terror, the fire of life had left my veins, so that I sat there in the warm sunshine and shivered until my teeth chattered.  Inside, the woman was singing over her work.