y as a sea-bird flying overhead might have done.

Geoffrey was of a placid and easy, perhaps lazy, disposition; but his
placidity rested like the ice of a mountain lake on deep and dangerous
water. It was hard to ruffle him or even to move him; but when moved he
was apt not to return to the position he had left, nor to be quite
natural to the new position.

"How far away is your house?" asked Dacre.

"Not far; there, you see the light over there. Old Reynolds is sitting
up for me and keeping the kettle going. He sticks by me through thick
and thin. I have tried to make him take a better place, but he will not
go."

Dacre was silent, and they walked on, descending from the cliffs and
following a path across the wide lawn-like fields, darkened by enormous
heaps of shadow from scattered chestnut trees.

An hour before the young men crossed these fields another figure, a
woman's, had travelled the same path. She was wrapped in a dark cloak,
and though she had lingered and loitered on the cliff-walk, she hurried
on the lower ground till she arrived near Geoffrey's lodge.

The speed with which she had walked proved that the woman was young, and
when the strong wind tightened the light cloak on the outline of her
tall figure, it could be seen, even in the moonlight, that she was
lissome and beautiful.

She had, on leaving the cliff path, steered straight for the light in
Geoffrey's house; but when she approached it she walked slowly, and at
last stopped in the deep shade of a tree within fifty feet of the lodge.
From this position she could look into Geoffrey's sitting-room, where a
fire burned brightly and a light stood in the window facing the cliff.

"I shall wait here," she said, speaking to herself, as if to give
herself courage by the whisper; "no one has seen me--no one but he shall
ever know."

But the next moment she almost screamed with terror at a sound behind
her. A bramble cracked, and she saw a man within a few yards of her. She
was terribly frightened, and could not speak or move.

It was old Reynolds, Geoffrey's servant, who had seen her on the cliff
walk, and had taken a night glass, with which his master often watched
the ships, to see if this were not he returning from the house. Seeing a
woman, Reynolds was surprised, for the cliff walk was lonely and not too
safe. He was still more surprised to see her turn into the path to the
lodge, and he had not lost sight of her for a moment till she stoppe