brink of a broken Cornish
cliffline, above the grey surges of the Atlantic, among a wilderness of
dark rocks, facing black moors, which rolled away from the cliffs as
lonely and desolate as eternity. The place had been built by a London
artist, long since dead, who had lived there and painted seascapes from an
upstairs studio which overlooked the sea.

The house had remained empty for years until Robert Turold had taken it
six months before. It was too isolated and lonely to gain a permanent
tenant, and it stood in the teeth of Atlantic gales. The few scattered
houses and farms of the moors cringed from the wind in sheltered
depressions, but Flint House faced its everlasting fury on the top of the
cliffs, a rugged edifice of grey stone, a landmark visible for many miles.

The house suited Robert Turold well enough, because it was near the
churchtown in which he was conducting his final investigations. It never
occurred to him to consider whether it suited his wife and daughter. It
was a house, and it was furnished; what more was necessary? It was nothing
to him if his wife and daughter were unhappy. It was nothing to him if the
sea roared and the house shook as he sat poring at nights over his
parchments in the dead artist's studio. He had other things to occupy his
mind than Nature's brutality or the feelings of womanhood.

Sisily had climbed down to the foot of the rocks. She was sitting in her
favourite spot, a spur of rock overhanging a green nook in the broken
ugliness of the cliffs, sheltered from the sea by an encircling arm of
rock, and reached by a steep path down the cliff. Around her towered an
amphitheatre of vast cliffs in which the sea sang loud music to the spirit
of solitude. In the moaning waters in front of the cove a jagged rock rose
from the incomparable green, tilted backward and fantastically shaped,
like a great grave face watching the house on the summit of the cliff.

The rock had fascinated the girl from the first moment she had seen it. In
the summer months, tourists came from afar to gaze on its fancied
resemblance to one of the illustrious dead. But to Sisily there was a
secret brooding consciousness in the dark mask. It seemed to her to be
watching and waiting for something. For what? Its glance seemed to follow
her like the eyes of a picture. And it conveyed a menace by its mere
proximity, even when she could not see it. When she looked out of her
window at night, and saw only the shado