Omaha daily bee., 1919-07-11
THE
WOMAN IN BLACK
BIZ EDMUND CLERlHEW BENTLEY
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Woman in Black.

The sea- broke raging upon the
foot. of the cliff under good
breeze; the sun flooded the land
with life from dappled blue sky. In
this perfection of English weather,
Trent, who had slept i'll, went down
before 8 O'Clock to a pool among
the rocks, the direction of which
had been given him, and dived deep
into clear water. Between vast gray
boulders he swan out to the tossing
open, forced himself some little way
against a coast-wise current, and
then returned to his refuge battered
and refreshed. Ten minutes later
he was scaling the cliff again, and
his mind, cleared for the moment OF
heavy disgust for the affair he had
in hand, was turning over his plans
for the morning.
1t was the day of the inquest, the
Gay after his arrival in the place.
He had carried matters not much
farther after parting with the Amer
lean on the road to Bishopsbridge.
In the afternoon he had walked
from the inn into the town, accom-
panied by Mr.. Cupples and had there
made certain purchases at chem
lists shop, conferred privately for
some time with photographer,
sent of a reply-paid telegram, and
made an inquiry at the telephone
exchange. He had said but little
about the case to Mr.. Cupples, who
seemed injurious on his side, and
nothing at all about the results Of
his investigation or the steps he
was about to take. After their re-
turn from Bishopsbridge, Trent had
written a long dispatch for the
Record, and sent it to be tele-
graphed by the proud hands of the
papers local representative.
This morning as he scaled the
cliff he told himself that he had
never taken W a case he liked so
little, or which absorbed him so
much. The more he contemplated
it in the golden sunshine of this
new day, the more evil and the more
challenging it appeared. All that he
suspected ard all that he almost
knew had occupied his questing
brain for hours to the exclusion of
sleep; and in this glorious light and
air. though washed in body and
spirit by the fierce purity of the sea,
he only saw the more clearly the
darkness of the guilt in which he
believed, and was more bitterly re-
PEELED by the motive at which he
guessed. But now at least his zeal
was awake again, and the sense of
the hunt quickened. He would
neither slacken nor spare; here need
be no conjunction. In the course
of the day, he hoped, his net would
be complete. He had work to do in
the morning; and with very vivid
expectancy, though not much Sc
rious hope, he awaited the answer
to the telegram which he had shot
into the sky, as it were, the day
before.
The path back to the hotel wound
foi soMe way along the top of the
cliff, and on nearing a spot he had
marked from the sea level, where
the face had fallen away long ago,
he approached the edge and looked
down, hoping to follow with his
eyes the most delicately beautiful of
all the movement of water, the wash
OF light sea over broken rock. But
no rock was there. A few feet be-
low him a broad ledge stood out, a
rough platform as large as great
room, thickly grown with wiry grass
and walled in steeply on three sides.
There, close to the verge where the
cliff at last dropped \sheer, a wom-
an was sitting, her arms about her
drawn up knees, her eyes fixed on
the trailing smoke of distant liner,
her face full of some dream.
This woman seemed to Trent,
whose training had taught him to
live in his eyes, to make the most
beautiful picture he had ever seen.
Her face of southern pallor, touched
by the kiss of the wind with color
on the cheek, presented to him a
profile of delicate regularity in
which there was nothing hard;
nevertheless the black brows bend
ind down toward the point where
thew almost met gave her in repose