In the afternoon he had walked from the
inn into the town, accompanied by Mr Cupples, and had there made certain
purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time with a
photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an enquiry at the
telephone exchange. He had said but little about the case to Mr Cupples,
who seemed incurious on his side, and nothing at all about the results
of his investigation or the steps he was about to take. After their
return from Bishopsbridge, Trent had written a long dispatch for the
Record and sent it to be telegraphed by the proud hands of the paper's
local representative. He had afterwards dined with Mr Cupples, and had
spent the rest of the evening in meditative solitude on the veranda.

This morning as he scaled the cliff he told himself that he had never
taken up a case he liked so little, or which absorbed him so much. The
more he contemplated it in the golden sunshine of this new day, the more
evil and the more challenging it appeared. All that he suspected and
all that he almost knew had occupied his questing brain for hours to the
exclusion of sleep; and in this glorious light and air, though washed
in body and spirit by the fierce purity of the sea, he only saw the more
clearly the darkness of the guilt in which he believed, and was more
bitterly repelled by the motive at which he guessed. But now at least
his zeal was awake again, and the sense of the hunt quickened. He would
neither slacken nor spare; here need be no compunction. In the course of
the day, he hoped, his net would be complete. He had work to do in the
morning; and with very vivid expectancy, though not much serious hope,
he awaited the answer to the telegram which he had shot into the sky, as
it were, the day before.

The path back to the hotel wound for some way along the top of the
cliff, and on nearing a spot he had marked from the sea level, where the
face had fallen away long ago, he approached the edge and looked down,
hoping to follow with his eyes the most delicately beautiful of all the
movements of water--the wash of a light sea over broken rock. But no
rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough
platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and
walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the
cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her
drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a