aiting
for her at the cliff top. He helped her up and then the dream changed
to something else, and to something else, till she woke suddenly to the
recognition that she had been asleep for a long time and that fear,
deadly fear, was clutching her by the throat.

She sat up, leaning on her elbow. The rain was still falling, though the
sound of it was much less, and the blackness was so intense that it
seemed moulded round her. She felt for the knife and found it. Then she
lay down again, listening.

The tide was coming in and she recognised, and not for the first time, a
curious singing, chanting echo that always accompanied the waves of the
incoming tide.

Fear is reasonless, it is also Protean, and this sea voice coming
through the night turned the fear of La Touche to the fear of Bompard.
What if he were to return, cold and wet, from that terrible grave-yard
beyond the rocks?

CHAPTER XV

THE STROKE

As she lay, listening, through the black darkness and the singing of the
sea came a faint sound as of something dragging itself along the sand at
the cave entrance. She clutched the knife and sat up. A waft of wind
brought with it a tang of stale tobacco and rain-wet clothes. It was La
Touche.

She drew up her feet and sat crouched against the sailcloth, the knife
half-held in her lap, her fingers nerveless, her mind paralysed with the
knowledge that now, immediately, she would _have_ to fight, that the
Beast was all but upon her. She knew.

She could hear him breathing now and the faint sound of his hands
feeling gently over the floor of the cave. He was searching for her, the
fume of him filled the place, he was almost in touch with her, yet still
she sat helpless as a little child, paralysed in the blackness, as a
bird before a crawling cat. Yet her right hand as though endowed with a
volition of its own was tightening its grasp upon the hilt of the knife.

She had no longer reasoning power. Reasoning power and energy seemed
now in the possession of the knife.

Then something touched her left boot and at the touch her hand struck
out into the darkness, blindly and furiously, driving the knife home to
the hilt in something that fell with a choking sound across her feet.
She forced her feet from the thing that had suddenly fallen on them,
rose, sprang across it and passed through the cave entrance with the
surety of a person moving in broad daylight.

Then the pouring rain on her face brought her