The house suited Robert Turold well enough, because it was near the churchtown in which he was conducting his final investigations.  It never occurred to him to consider whether it suited his wife and daughter.  It was a house, and it was furnished; what more was necessary?  It was nothing to him if his wife and daughter were unhappy.  It was nothing to him if the sea roared and the house shook as he sat poring at nights over his parchments in the dead artist’s studio.  He had other things to occupy his mind than Nature’s brutality or the feelings of womanhood.

Sisily had climbed down to the foot of the rocks.  She was sitting in her favourite spot, a spur of rock overhanging a green nook in the broken ugliness of the cliffs, sheltered from the sea by an encircling arm of rock, and reached by a steep path down the cliff.  Around her towered an amphitheatre of vast cliffs in which the sea sang loud music to the spirit of solitude.  In the moaning waters in front of the cove a jagged rock rose from the incomparable green, tilted backward and fantastically shaped, like a great grave face watching the house on the summit of the cliff.

The rock had fascinated the girl from the first moment she had seen it.  In the summer months, tourists came from afar to gaze on its fancied resemblance to one of the illustrious dead.  But to Sisily there was a secret brooding consciousness in the dark mask.  It seemed to her to be watching and waiting for something.  For what?  Its glance seemed to follow her like the eyes of a picture.  And it conveyed a menace by its mere proximity, even when she could not see it.  When she looked out of her window at night, and saw only the shadow of the rock with the face veiled in darkness, she seemed to hear the whisper of its words:  “I am here.  Do not think to escape.  I will have you yet.”

Among the fisher-folk of that part of the coast it was known as the Moon Rock.  The old Cornish women had a tradition that when a fishing-boat failed to return to that bay of storms, the spirit of the drowned man would rise to the surface and answer his wife if she hailed him from the shore.  It was a rite and solemn ceremony, now fallen into decay.  There was a story of one young wife who, getting no answer, left her desolate cottage at midnight and swam out to the Moon Rock at high tide.  She had scrambled up its slippery sides and called her husband from the summit.  She had called and called his name until he came.  In the morning they were found—­the wife, and the husband who had been called from the depth of the sea, floating together in one of the sea caverns at the base of the Moon Rock, their white faces tangled in the red seaweed which streaked the green surging water like blood.