state of mind induced by his
sudden cutting-off from his kind and flinging back upon himself, it
seemed as though the blood-red sun had fallen into a vast consuming fire
behind that dark, fire-rimmed cloud, and that that was the end of it,
and it would never rise again.

The sky, right away into the farthest east, was flaming red with a hint
of underlying smoke below the glow. The sea was a weltering bath of
blood, and the cliffs of Sark, save for the gleam of white foam at their
feet, shone as red as though they had just been bodily dipped in it.

His lonely rock, when he looked round at it in wonder, was all
unfamiliarly red. There was a red fantastic glow in the very air, and he
himself was as red as though he had in very fact killed Tom Hamon, and
drenched himself with his blood.

So startling and unnatural was it all, that he found himself wondering
fearfully if these outside things were really all blood-red, or whether
something had gone wrong with his brain and eyes, and only caused them
to look so to him alone, or whether it was indeed the end of all things
shaping itself slowly under his very eyes. And in that thought and fear
he was not by any means alone.

But the wonderful red, which in its universality and intensity had
become overpowering and fearsome, faded at last, and he hailed its going
with a sigh of relief. His eyes and his brain were all right, he had not
killed Tom Hamon, and this was not the earth's last sunset.

And again that night, as he sat on the ridge on sentinel duty till the
rising tide should lock the doors of his castle, the sea all round him
shone with phosphorescence; every breaking wave along the black plain
was a lambent gleam of lightning, and where they tore up the sides of
his rock they were like flames out of a fiery sea, so that he sat there
looking down upon a weltering band of nickering green and blue fires,
which clung to the black ledges and dripped slowly back into the
seething gleam below.

It was all very strange and very awesome, and he wondered what it might
portend in the way of further marvels.

And he had not long to wait.

Far away in the Atlantic a cyclone had been raging, and carrying havoc
in its skirts. Now it was whirling towards Europe, and the puffins crept
deep into their holes, and the gulls circled with disconsolate cries,
and the cormorants crouched gloomily in lee of their snuggest ledges,
and all nature seemed waiting for the blow.

Gard was