Madge flew on ahead, deaf to Lady McIntyre's, "Wait for your father, darling,"—as though Sir William's presence might be trusted to exercise a mollifying effect upon the mine, a theory which, however, she wasn't long in publicly abandoning.
Fifty yards or so this side of a rock-strewn indentation in the low coast-line there it lay, that strange, new creature of the deep, with nothing in its aspect to account for the instantaneous aversion it inspired in Lady McIntyre. Gray-white, shaped like a great egg or a pear, according to your angle of vision, seen at closer quarters it might be taken for a well-stuffed laundry-bag, except for the something odd protruding from its mouth. Lady McIntyre made no secret of her intention to give it a wide berth. As the others went toward the Thing, Lady McIntyre, left alone some yards away, called out, "I wish you wouldn't, William!"
"Wouldn't what?" he said good-humoredly over his shoulder. "I thought we had come for the express purpose of examining it."
"Yes, but I—I didn't know it would be like that."
"You can hardly have expected it to look more harmless," Sir William said as he went closer.
"That's just it." Her wail said she wouldn't have minded it half so much had it been more frankly infernal. "Anyway, Madge mustn't—" Then, with a rising terror in her voice, Lady McIntyre betrayed the degree to which she had lost her bearings at sight of that mysterious messenger of death. "William," she cried, "make Madge come away."
"It's all right, my dear, as long as they aren't touched. This is the part, you see—"
As he appeared to be in the act of doing the very thing he himself had said was likely to have dire results, Lady McIntyre raised her voice still higher. "Greta, do, do bring Madge here!"
Greta, enveloped in a canvas coat and gray-white motor-veil, was squatting by the enemy. She seemed to hear nothing, as she crouched there on the sand. The others listened to Sir William, and they, too, looked at the Thing, all except Napier. He looked at the huddled figure staring with that curious expression at the mine. It was canvas-covered like herself. Like herself, of rounded contour and of incalculable capacity for harm. It struck Napier rather horribly that there was kinship between the two, that she hung over the infernal thing like a mother might over her child.
"Mr. Napier,"—Lady McIntyre's voice shrilled sharply behind him—"will you get Madge to come away?"