r yielded to the lifting of the latch, and he found himself in the
open air.

It was a grey northern night, with a bitter wind driving the sea mist in
billows over the marshes, and a waning half moon shining fitfully
through the dingy clouds which scudded across a lead-coloured sky. By
the light of the moon he saw the figure of the girl, already some
distance from the house, swiftly making her way along the reedy canal
path which threaded the oozing marshes.

Colwyn was not a stranger to marshlands. He had waded knee-deep from dawn
to dusk through Irish bogs after wild geese; he had followed the
migratory seafowl of Finland, Russia and Serbia into their Scottish
breeding haunts, and he had once tried to keep pace with the sweep of
the Bore over the Solway Marshes, but he had never undertaken a task so
difficult as following this girl across a Norfolk marshland. The path
she trod so unhesitatingly was narrow, and slippery, with the canal on
one side and the marshes on the other. In keeping clear of the canal
Colwyn frequently found himself slipping into the marshes. His feet and
legs speedily became wet and caked with ooze, and once he nearly lost
one of his boots, which he had pulled on hurriedly outside the inn, and
left unlaced.

But the girl walked straight on with a swift and even gait, treading the
narrow path across the morass as securely as though she had been on the
high road. Colwyn soon realised that the path they were following was
taking them straight across the marshes to the sea. The surging of the
waves against the breakwater sounded increasingly loud on his ears, and
after a while he saw the breakwater itself rise momentarily out of the
darkness like a yellow wall, only to disappear again. But presently it
was visible once more, looming out in increasing clearness, with a
ghostly glimmering of the grey waters of the North Sea heaving
turbulently outside.

As they neared the breakwater the path became drier and firmer, and the
light of the moon, falling through a ragged rift in the scurrying
clouds, showed a line of sand banks and strips of tussock-land emerging
from the marshes as the marshes approached the sea.

The girl kept on with the same resolute pace, until she reached a spot
where the canal found its outlet to the sea. There she turned aside and
skirted the breakwater wall for a little distance, as if searching for
something. The next moment she was scaling the breakwater wall. Colwyn
was t