Katherine uttered a great cry, and ran wildly towards the house. And then she stopped herself and went back to the cliff and gazed again. It might only be a fishing-boat made into a wonderful thing by the moonlight. When she looked again it had already made a great advance in the direction of the white cliff, to the east; it was crossing the bay, gliding very smoothly on the soft waves. The Stella—could it be the Stella?—and where was her sister? She gathered up her long white dress more securely and plunged down the dark path towards the beach. The door was locked, there was not a sound anywhere.
“Stella!” she cried, louder than ever. “Stella! where are you?” but nobody heard, not even in the sleeping house, where surely there must be some one waking who could help her. This made her remember that Stevens, the maid, must be waking, or at least not in bed. She hurried in, past the dying fire in the hall, and up the silent stairs, the sleeping house so still that the creak of a plank under her feet sounded like a shriek. But there was no Stevens to be found, neither in the young ladies’ rooms where she should have been, nor in her own; everything was very tidy, there was not a brush nor a pocket-handkerchief out of place, and the trim, white bed was not even prepared for any inhabitant. It was as if it were a bed of death.
Then Katherine bethought her to go again to the gardener’s wife in the lodge, who had a lantern. She had been woke up before, perhaps it was less harm to wake her up again (this was not logical, but Katherine was above logic). Finally, the woman was roused, and her husband along with her, and the lantern lighted, and the three made a circle of the shrubberies. There was nothing to be found there. The man declared that the door was not only locked but jammed, so that it would be very hard to open it, and he unhesitatingly swore that it was the Stella which was now gliding round beyond the Bunbridge cliffs.
“How do you know it is the Stella? It might be any yacht,” cried Katherine.
The man did not condescend to make any explanation. “I just knows it,” he said.
It was proved presently by this messenger, despatched in haste to ascertain, that the Stella was gone from the pier, and there was nothing more to be said.
The sight of these three, hunting in every corner, filling the grounds with floating gleams of light, and voices and steps no longer subdued, while the house lay open full of sleep, the lamp burning in the hall but nobody stirring, was a strange sight. At length there was a sound heard in the silent place. A window was thrown open, a night-capped head was thrust into the air.
“What the deuce is all this row about?” cried the voice of Mr. Tredgold. “Who’s there? Look out for yourselves, whoever you are; I’m not going to have strangers in my garden at this hour of the night.”
And the old man, startled, put a climax to the confusion by firing wildly into space. The gardener’s wife gave a shriek and fell, and the house suddenly woke up, with candles moving from window to window, and men and women calling out in different tones of fury and affright, “Who is there? Who is there?”