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 thoughts to a more perceptible danger.  If he could see that man more than half a mile away, his own figure must be apparent over a long distance in that clear brown expanse.  Perhaps at that very moment the policeman from the churchtown was prowling about the moors in search of him.  His actions at that lonely house were suspicious enough to attract anybody’s attention.  That was an act of imprudence which he had no right to commit.  He had not evaded the keen eyes of the London police to be trapped like a rat by a rural constable.  It was too dangerous for him to remain there.  He determined to spend the rest of the day among the cliffs, and return to Flint House when night fell.

He walked away, briskly at first, but with a more laggard step as he plunged into the shelter of the great rocks, for he had had nothing to eat since the night before, and was beginning to be conscious of his weakness.  But he strode on, doggedly enough, for more than an hour, until he found himself at a part of the coast he had not seen before—­a theatre of black rocks, with dark towering walls, and a hissing sea whitening at the base.

At the foot of these cliffs three jagged conical rocks rose bare and glistening, the spray from the broken sea dashing far up their sides.  As Charles stood there, looking down, he saw a man appear from the edge of the furthest one and walk rapidly across the sloping shelf of rock which spanned the narrow bay near the surface of the sea.  His heart leapt within him as he took in the figure of the man.  It was Thalassa.

As Charles climbed down from the higher cliffs to intercept him, there came to his mind an imperfectly comprehended fragment of conversation which he had overheard, between waking and dozing, in the train that morning.  The voices drifted to his dulled hearing from the next compartment, where some men seemed to be discussing somebody of whom they stood in dread, somebody who was forever striding along the cliffs with his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, as though seeking some one.  The object of the mysterious being’s quest, if it was a quest, nobody who met him cared to ask.  So much he had gathered.  He had heard one of the speakers say:  “I’ve met un, ever so laate, stalkin’ aloong like th’ devil.  Tes aw token o’ a bad conscience.  Tes dreadful to think about.  I got owt o’ his way....  I’d as soon speak to th’ devil.  Iss, aw’d.”  Charles had thought nothing of this chatter at the time, but he wondered now if they were talking of Thalassa.  Did the local fisherfolk believe that he had something to do with the murder, and shunned him like Ishmael in consequence?