ic shirt had despair upon his face. He knew that
his hour had come. And the eyes of the Scarlet Admiral were ever sadder
and ever fiercer. Then, with a sudden move, a little turn of his agile
body, the Scarlet Admiral had the young man through the breast. The
young man threw up his arms and cried; and as the Scarlet Admiral
withdrew his sword, dripping with blood from his body, the young man
fell backwards over the cliff into the sea. Then the Scarlet Admiral
wiped his sword on the grass and, slowly and sadly, walked down the
cliff-path even as he had walked up. He joined his men, they found their
boat, pushed out to their ship, and even as they landed upon her she
had disappeared. A moment later the fool saw the parson of Rafiel
Church coming round the corner for his morning bathe, and two minutes
afterwards nothing human was to be seen save the naked limbs of the
parson and his little bundle of black clothes lying neatly upon a stone.
Then the fool ran all the way home to his mother who was a widow, and
sat and cried and cried for the beautiful young man who had been slain,
nor would he eat, nor taste the excellent Rafiel beer, and he pined
away, and at last he died, first telling this history to his mother,
who, like all widows, was a garulous woman and loved a good story...

Impossible to imagine with what life and fire old Miss Henhouse gave
this history. You could see with your own eyes the golden ship, the
diamond buckles of the Scarlet Admiral, the young man's sad eyes, the
parson's black clothes. When she had finished it seemed to Jeremy that
it must have been just so. She told him that now on a summer morning
or evening the Scarlet Admiral might still be seen, climbing the
cliff-path, wiping his sword upon the grass, gazing out with sad eyes to
sea. Jeremy swore to himself that on the next occasion of visiting the
Cove he would watch... he would watch-but to no single human being would
he speak anything of this.

This was the second reason why he had looked forward so eagerly to the
sea-picnic.

III

The day arrived, and it was marvellously fine--one of those days in
August when heat possesses the world and holds it tranced and still, but
has in the very strength of its possession some scent of the decay and
chill of autumn that is to follow so close upon its heels. There was
no breeze, no wind from the sea, only a sky utterly without cloud and a
world without sound.

Punctually at eleven of the