n into the darkness, was always fascinating to him.

When the moon flooded the gulf on the left with shimmering silver, and
the waves broke along the black rocks below in crisp white foam like
silver frost, he would stand by the hour there and never tire of it.

The moon cast such a mystic glamour over those great voids of darkness
and over the headlands, melting softly away, fold behind fold, on the
right, while Little Sark became a mystery land into which the white path
rambled enticingly and invited one to follow.

And to him, as his eyes followed it till it disappeared over the crown
of the ridge, it was more than a mystery land--a land of promise, rich
in La Closerie and Nance.

Always within him, as he watched, was the feeling that if the sweet
slim figure should come tripping down the moonlit path towards him, he
would be in no way astonished. When he stood there, watching, it seemed
to him that it would be entirely fitting for her to come so, in the calm
soft light that was as pure and sweet as herself.

And at times his eye would light on the grim black pile of L'Etat, lying
out there in the silvery shimmer like some great monumental cairn, a
rough and rugged heap of loneliness and mystery--the grimmer and
lonelier by reason of the twinkling brightness of its setting. And then
his thoughts would play about the lonely pile, and come back with a
sense of homely relief to the fairy path which Nance's little feet had
trod, in light and dark, and storm and shine, since ever she could walk.

He pictured her as a tiny girl running fearlessly across the grim
pathway to school, dancing in the sunshine, bending to the storm, and
all alone when she had been kept in--he wondered with a smile what she
had been kept in for.

He thought of her, as he had seen her, walking to church, her usually
blithe spirit tuned to sedateness by the very fact, and, to him,
delightfully stiffened by the further fact that she, almost alone among
her friends and school-fellows, wore Island costume, while all the rest
flaunted it in all the colours of the rainbow. And he laughed happily to
himself, for very joy, at thought of the sweet elusive face in the
shadow of the great sun-bonnet. There was not a face in all Sark to
compare with it, nor, for him, in all the world.

But this night, as be stood there pulling slowly at his pipe and
thinking of Nance, was one of the black nights.

Later on there would be a remnant of a moon, but as y