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Captain Acton walked slowly towards Old Harbour Town. He was sunk in thought, and was in deep distress and at a loss to know what to do. He had no machinery of police to command. 1805 was a year very primitive as compared with 1905. He reflected that the first step in the disappearance of his daughter as represented in the statement of Mr Adams might indicate nothing in respect of the real cause of her disappearance. Because, suppose his surmise was correct, and that she had hastened to the help of some afflicted or humble person whom she befriended, she might, after having left the place wherever it was, have met with some disaster; she might have fallen over the cliff—she might on some roundabout way home have been robbed and left for[Pg 197] dying; in short, when a person mysteriously disappears a hundred reasons for his or her envanishment will occur to the mind, and any one of them may so satisfy, so convince, that those who accept it will go to work as though it were the truth though it possess but the very attenuated merit of being a conjecture.,

She turned her eyes upon him when the surly shell-back had come to this part of his thoughts, and frowned without recognition in her face as he read it. She stared at him, not with the heavy-lidded, beautiful eyes of Lucy Acton, but with orbs of sight whose glances seemed keen as rays of light as they shot from under her knitted brows. Though her fair forehead was deformed by a scowl, her lips were curved into a meaningless smile—the very expression of the idiot's highest facial effort, and all meaning or no meaning that was in her countenance was accentuated by the unusual, uncommon, very faint tinge which had taken the place of the habitual bloom of her cheeks and paled her into an aspect of distraction, wildness, and insanity.,

Billy nodded. "An' is the schooner still anchored off here?" he asked. "I might take a fish-boat an' row out to her, if she is.",

"I didn't play no trick on you," Billy repeated.

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"I am indeed, and have no words in which to convey my thanks to you for your kindness.",

"Surely," she said, "they are not as ferocious as they are said to be?",

The Admiral stood looking as though petrified. All the wrath that was in him, all the fierce and terrible thoughts which had raged in his heart and prepared his tongue for a delivery desperate and fearful in the mouth of a father, melted, vanished, faded as smoke in the air, as a shred of mist torn from a cloud in the sky, and his face wore an expression of unutterable grief, of horror beyond expression in words, every passion and emotion it displayed being irradiated by the light of a father's love which had seemed to be waning and expiring in its socket, but which found life and power in that mute, irresistible prayer addressed to him as a father by an only son whose valour[Pg 438] he had honoured, whose beauty he was proud of, whose life appealed to him more deeply in that his career had been halted by an act of folly when his reputation stood high for heroic daring. He went to the side of the body; he looked down upon the face with tearless eyes, and with that same dry sob in his throat which Captain Acton had heard when the poor old gentleman spoke after Mr Greyquill's visit, then sank upon his knees beside his son, muttering: "Walter, oh, Walter, that it should have come to this! I loved you, my son—may God pity me, and have mercy upon you!",

CHAPTER IX MOVING THE MENAGERIE