m; there was none.

By instinct he avoided the sharp ridge of the rocks, and kept to the
strand as much as possible. It was there that he met with the pitfalls.
They were multiplied before him under three forms: the pitfall of water,
the pitfall of snow, and the pitfall of sand. This last is the most
dangerous of all, because the most illusory. To know the peril we face
is alarming; to be ignorant of it is terrible. The child was fighting
against unknown dangers. He was groping his way through something which
might, perhaps, be the grave.

He did not hesitate. He went round the rocks, avoided the crevices,
guessed at the pitfalls, obeyed the twistings and turnings caused by
such obstacles, yet he went on. Though unable to advance in a straight
line, he walked with a firm step. When necessary, he drew back with
energy. He knew how to tear himself in time from the horrid bird-lime of
the quicksands. He shook the snow from about him. He entered the water
more than once up to the knees. Directly that he left it, his wet knees
were frozen by the intense cold of the night. He walked rapidly in his
stiffened garments; yet he took care to keep his sailor's coat dry and
warm on his chest. He was still tormented by hunger.

The chances of the abyss are illimitable. Everything is possible in it,
even salvation. The issue may be found, though it be invisible. How the
child, wrapped in a smothering winding-sheet of snow, lost on a narrow
elevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus is
what he could not himself have explained. He had slipped, climbed,
rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of
all triumphs. At the end of somewhat less than half an hour he felt
that the ground was rising. He had reached the other shore. Leaving
Chesil, he had gained terra firma.

The bridge which now unites Sandford Castle with Smallmouth Sands did
not then exist. It is probable that in his intelligent groping he had
reascended as far as Wyke Regis, where there was then a tongue of sand,
a natural road crossing East Fleet.

He was saved from the isthmus; but he found himself again face to face
with the tempest, with the cold, with the night.

Before him once more lay the plain, shapeless in the density of
impenetrable shadow. He examined the ground, seeking a footpath.
Suddenly he bent down. He had discovered, in the snow, something which
seemed to him a track.

It was indeed a track--the p