Their host, restless, mortified, angry, perplexed by turns, was becoming obsessed at length with dull premonitions and vaguer alarms.
He waddled out to the lawn several times, still wearing his fancy gilt and tissue cap, and called:
“Nihla! Damnation! Answer me, you little fool!”
He went down to the river, where the gaily painted row-boats and punts lay, and scanned the silvered 26 flood, tortured by indefinite apprehensions. About dawn he started toward the weed-grown, slippery river-stairs for the last time, still crowned with his tinsel cap; and there in the darkness he found his aged boat-man, fishing for gudgeon with a four-cornered net suspended to the end of a bamboo pole.
“Have you see anything of Mademoiselle Nihla?” he demanded, in a heavy, unsteady voice, tremulous with indefinable fears.
“Monsieur le Comte, Mademoiselle Quellen went out in a canoe with a young gentleman.”
“W-what is that you tell me!” faltered the Comte d’Eblis, turning grey in the face.
“Last night, about ten o’clock, M’sieu le Comte. I was out in the moonlight fishing for eels. She came down to the shore—took a canoe yonder by the willows. The young man had a double-bladed paddle. They were singing.”
“They—they have not returned?”
“No, M’sieu le Comte——”