out of him--yes, by
God, he would! When he found him, but where was he to be found? The crafty
old scoundrel might be in the house at that moment, lurking there like a
wolf, perhaps grinning down at him from behind some closed window.... A
sudden rage surged over him at that thought, and he fell savagely on the
shut door, beating it with insensate fury with his fists. Damn him, he
would force his way in!

The cormorant ruffled its greenish feathers and watched him curiously. The
faint cries of the gulls overhead seemed borne downward with a note of
mocking derision. Charles Turold stepped back from the door with an uneasy
look at the cormorant, as though fearing to detect in its unreflecting
beadiness of glance some humanly cynical enjoyment at his loss of
self-control. The wave of feeling had spent itself. Not thus was victory
to be won. He paused to consider, then tried the knocker again. The
knocker smote the wood with a hollow sound, like a stroke on the iron door
of a vault, loud enough to rouse the dead. Charles Turold had a
disagreeable impression of Robert Turold starting up in his grave-clothes
at the summons, listening.... But no! The dead man was safe in his grave
by this time. He had forgotten that.

A sudden silence fell on the house: a deep and profound stillness, as
though seas and wind had hushed their wailing speech to listen for the
answer to the knock. The birds, too, were silent. The house remained
immutably quiet. Charles Turold bent down, and peered through the keyhole,
but could see nothing within but darkness. Then, as he looked, a sound
reached his ears, a sound like a thin cackle of laughter from the interior
of the house. In the gathering gloom within he had a momentary impression
of a stealing greyish shape--a shape which vanished from his vision as he
looked.

He rose to his feet, his mind groping blindly for some tangible
explanation of this spectral thing, but finding none. A ghost? He shook
off that feeling roughly. God knows, that house might well be haunted, but
not by a ghost that could laugh, though there was no merriment in that
ghastly cackle. The reality of the thing, whatever it was, could not be
worse than the sound. Had he really seen anything, after all? Was there
some trap about it, some danger to himself? He would have to risk that.

The distant sight of a human figure far away on the wide space of the
moors, clambering over the granite slabs of a stile, turned his thought