Flint House looked a picture of desolation in the chill grey day, wrapped in such silence that Charles’s cautious knock seemed to reverberate through the stillness around.  But the knocking, repeated more loudly, aroused no human response.  After waiting awhile the young man pulled the bell.  From within the house a cracked and jangling tinkle echoed faintly, and then quivered into silence.  He rang again, but there was no sound of foot or voice; no noise but the cries of the gulls overhead and the hoarse beat of the sea at the foot of the cliffs.

A cormorant, sitting on a rock near by, twisted its thin neck to stare fearlessly at the visitor.  But Charles Turold was not thinking of cormorants.  Where was Thalassa?  Where was his wife?  He believed they were still in Cornwall, but they might have left the house.  He had been in London a long while.  Not so long, though—­only twelve days.  Twelve days!  Twelve eternities of unendurable hopelessness and loneliness, such as the damned might know.  Was he to fail, now, after finding Sisily?  He had a responsibility, a solemn duty.  He had reached Cornwall safely from London—­run the gauntlet of all the watching eyes of the police—­and he would not go back without seeing Thalassa.  His mind was thoroughly made up.  He would find him, if he had to walk every inch of Cornwall in search of him.  And when he found him he would wrest the truth 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.