omeward, the light of day had given place
to twilight. But not the twilight of imminent night, the twilight of
the coming tempest. For the brewing of a fearful storm had now some
time been apparent. A hush lay on the land. A candle flame would have
shot straight upward. Nature waited, silently cowering.

"To the northward advanced, in serried columns of black, the beetling
clouds that were turning the day into night, the distant booming of
aerial artillery thundering forth the preluding cannonade of the
charge. Higher and higher into the firmament shot the front of the
advancing ranks in twisting curls of inky smoke, yet all the while the
mass dropped nearer and nearer to the earth and the light of day
departed, save where low down in the west a band of pale gold lay
against the horizon, color and nothing more, as unglowing as a yellow
streak in a painted sunset. Against this weird, cold light, I saw a
naked mast, and then a sail went creaking up and I heard voices. They
had been shortening sail. By some unspent impulse of the vanished
wind, or the impact of the waves still rolling heavily and glassily
from a recent blow, the yacht was still progressing and came moving
past me fifty or sixty feet from shore.

"I heard the voices of women expressing terror, begging the men to do
something. Danger that comes in the dark is far more fearsome than
danger which comes in the light. I heard the men explaining the
impossibility of getting ashore. For two miles on this coast, a line
of low, but unscalable cliffs rose sheer from the water's edge,
overhanging it, in fact, for the waves had eaten several feet into the
base of the cliffs. To get out and stand in front of these cliffs was
to court death. The waves of the coming storm would either beat a man
to death against the rocks, or drown him, for the water was four feet
deep at the edge of the cliffs and the waves would wash over his head.
For two miles, I have said, there was a line of cliffs on this coast,
for two miles save just where I stood, the only break, a narrow rift
which, coinciding with a section line, was the end of a road coming
down to the water. They could not see this rift in the dusk, perhaps
were ignorant of its existence and so not looking for it.

"The voices I had heard were all unfamiliar and it was not until the
yacht had drifted past me that I was apprised it was indeed the craft
I sought by hearing the voice of Mildred saying, with an assumed
jocula