t
comfortable was it, an expression of human commiseration extended to him,
of special virtue also, he believed, to succour souls against leaguers of
darkness. All night he knew, aloft on the cliff in the desolate bell
tower, a monitress would serve each bell, and two would wait on a
beacon-light, and the prayers of the five would not cease for souls of
the living and souls of the dead, victims to fell powers of the sea. Ah,
blessed bells! And ah, dear saints whose names they bear!--St. Mary, St.
Margaret, St. Faith! The House Monitory prays to the dear saints; but the
simple, the ignorant, who go most in peril of that dangerous coast, when
they bless three names--St. Mary's, St. Margaret's, St. Faith's--do not
discriminate consciously between the saints whose influence lives in
heaven, and the bells that ring in evidence of how that influence lives
on earth. He fell asleep.

The tide came in, crept up the sand, blotted out footprints and weeds,
covered anemone pools and boulders, reached the full, turned and ebbed
back again. The moon rose, and as she mounted the dark clear-cut shadows
of the rocks shrank. The lad slept the dreamless sleep of healthful
weariness, till midnight was long past, and a wide stretch of sand lay
bare again. Then in her course the moon put back the shadows that had
covered his face; his breathing grew shorter; he stirred uneasily, and
woke.

Looking down, he saw the sand bared of the sea, white and glistening in
the moonlight. Quite distinct came the even stroke of the bells. The
night wind had chilled him, half naked as he was, so he crept from his
niche and dropped to the sands below, to pace away numbness. Only a few
steps he took; then he stood, and not from cold he trembled. A line of
footprints crossed the sand, clear and firm, and so light, that the
dainty sand-wrinkles were scarcely crushed out beneath them. And now the
mark of the heel is nearest the sea.

He knelt down to peer closer, stretched a hand, and touched one
footprint. Very fact it was, unless he dreamed. Kneeling still, he
scanned the broken lights and shadows that clung round the margin of
rock-girt sand. Ha! there in the shadow moves something white; it is
gliding half hidden by boulders. A human figure goes there at ease,
rising, stooping, bending to a pool. Long it bends, then with a natural
gesture of arms flung up, and hands locked upon the nape, steps out into
the full moonlight, clear to view.

The kneeling bo