kept his eye steadily on Frank, who sat down on
a little knoll of rock (where is now a garden on the cliff-edge) which
parts the path and the dark chasm down which the stream rushes to its
final leap over the cliff.

There Amyas sat a full half-hour, and glanced at whiles from Frank to
look upon the scene around. Outside the southwest wind blew fresh and
strong, and the moonlight danced upon a thousand crests of foam; but
within the black jagged point which sheltered the town, the sea did
but heave, in long oily swells of rolling silver, onward into the black
shadow of the hills, within which the town and pier lay invisible,
save where a twinkling light gave token of some lonely fisher's wife,
watching the weary night through for the boat which would return with
dawn. Here and there upon the sea, a black speck marked a herring-boat,
drifting with its line of nets; and right off the mouth of the
glen, Amyas saw, with a beating heart, a large two-masted vessel
lying-to--that must be the "Portugal"! Eagerly he looked up the glen,
and listened; but he heard nothing but the sweeping of the wind across
the downs five hundred feet above, and the sough of the waterfall upon
the rocks below; he saw nothing but the vast black sheets of oak-wood
sloping up to the narrow blue sky above, and the broad bright hunter's
moon, and the woodcocks, which, chuckling to each other, hawked to and
fro, like swallows, between the tree-tops and the sky.

At last he heard a rustle of the fallen leaves; he shrank closer and
closer into the darkness of the bank. Then swift light steps--not down
the path, from above, but upward, from below; his heart beat quick and
loud. And in another half-minute a man came in sight, within three yards
of Frank's hiding-place.

Frank sprang out instantly. Amyas saw his bright blade glance in the
clear October moonlight.

"Stand in the queen's name!"

The man drew a pistol from under his cloak, and fired full in his face.
Had it happened in these days of detonators, Frank's chance had been
small; but to get a ponderous wheel-lock under weigh was a longer
business, and before the fizzing of the flint had ceased, Frank had
struck up the pistol with his rapier, and it exploded harmlessly over
his head. The man instantly dashed the weapon in his face and closed.

The blow, luckily, did not take effect on that delicate forehead, but
struck him on the shoulder: nevertheless, Frank, who with all his grace
and agili