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were rooted to the floor. The next moment there was a series of ear-shattering crashes as the doors in the house slammed shut—first those on the first floor, where I was, then those above, and finally those underneath.
    The last bang woke me. I was sitting bolt upright and was sweating profusely. I looked anxiously around the room, but it was still empty. The daylight had grown in strength, though it was still considerably dulled by the thick curtains.
    On my second attempt, I realized that sleep was impossible. I could not sleep, and I did not want to. The dream had left a foul sense of uneasiness. I half expected to hear the doors in the house bang shut in succession as they had done in my imaginings. Abandoning even the urge to sleep, I climbed out of bed again and dressed. It was just after seven o'clock.
    Sarah had not come back. There was no sign of her in any of the downstairs rooms. I made a hot breakfast, washed down with three cups of strong black coffee. From time to time I found myself listening for footsteps. Sarah's footsteps, or so I told myself. There were no others, could not have been any others.
    Sarah's straw hat was not on the nail on the back of the door where she had hung it every evening on coining in from the garden. I looked around, but it was nowhere in the kitchen. It puzzled me that she should have taken it with her, when she had left everything else behind.
    Fortified by breakfast, I went out to the garden. The grass was still wet from the night before, but the sun was steadily growing stronger, and it looked set for a return of the fine weather. At least that would lift Sarah's spirits, I thought. Every so often I looked up, expecting to see her coming across the lawn, wearing her straw hat and smiling.
    I strolled down to the cliff edge, where she normally painted. There was no sign of her. There were five or six acres of grounds altogether, much of them covered in trees and bushes. I made a thorough search of the entire area, but nowhere could I find a trace of Sarah. Now I started to grow anxious again. If she was not in the house and not in the gardens, if she had not been on the road to Tredannack or the road leading in the opposite direction, where on earth could she be?
    There was one unpleasant possibility that I did my best to banish from my thoughts. But it kept nagging me until I could no longer ignore it. I made my way back to the cliff, and this time I looked deliberately and apprehensively over its edge, to the rocks below. A great sense of relief swept over me. There was nothing there. Sarah had not stumbled to her death in the dark.

    All day I waited, but she did not return. Somehow, she had given me the slip—stayed in the garden, perhaps, until she saw me leave, waited for my return from Tredannack, then set off in that direction after all. It all seemed so calculated, so calculating—that was the only problem. It was not in Sarah's nature to think things out like that, coldly, step-by-step. She was intuitive, given to impulses, never deliberate. And if her departure from the house had been as precipitate as I guessed, I could see little likelihood of her having hung about merely to play a trick on me.
    She could be anywhere by now, I thought. Most likely she was on her way to London and would ring me when she got there. The first trains from Penzance to Paddington arrived at 10:00, 11:45, and 1:40. The times were printed in the timetable we had brought with us in case one or the other might need to go back in a hurry without the car. I had thought to bring it; as I say, I was always the provident one.
    After each of the times a train was due, I waited for the phone to ring. We had rented a cellular for two months, knowing there would be none in the house and not wanting to be wholly incommunicado. I did not sit by it like a worried parent, but I waited nonetheless. It did not ring.
    The day passed, marked invisibly by these points of possible connection between Sarah and