It was a splendid spectacle and for some time he stood, with his face to the driving wind, gazing out upon the empty sea.  There was not a single vessel in all that wide expanse.

Slowly at last his vision narrowed.  His eyes came down to the great gash at his feet where red earth and tufts of grass mingled, where the daisies had grown on that June day, where she had sat, proud and aloof, and watched him fooling with the white petals.  Very vividly he recalled that summer afternoon, her scorn of him, her bitter hostility—­and the horror he had surprised in her dark eyes when the hawk had struck.  He laughed oddly to himself, his teeth clenched upon his lower lip.  How furiously she had hated him that day!

He turned to go; but paused, arrested by some instinct that bade him cast one more look downwards along the howling shore.  In another moment he was lying full length upon the rotten ground, staring intently down upon the group of rocks more than two hundred feet below him.

Two figures—­a man and a woman—­had detached themselves from the shelter of these rocks, and were moving slowly, very slowly, towards the path that led inwards from the shore.  They were closely linked together, so much his first glance told him.  But there was something in the man’s gait that caught the eye and upon which Nick’s whole attention was instantly focussed.  He could not see the face, but the loose-slung, gigantic limbs were familiar to him.  With all his knowledge of the world of men, he had not seen many such.

Slowly the two approached till they stood almost immediately beneath him, and there, as upon mutual impulse, they stopped.  It was a corner protected from the driving blast by the crumbling mass of cliff that had slipped in the night.  The rain was falling heavily again, but neither the two on the shore nor the solitary watcher stretched on the perilous edge of the cliff seemed aware of it.  All were intent upon other things.

Suddenly the woman raised her face, and with a movement that was passionate reached up her arms and clasped them about the man’s bent neck.  She was speaking, but no sound or echo of words was audible in that tumult.  Only her face lifted to the beating rain, with its passion of love, its anguish of pain, told the motionless spectator something of their significance.

It was hidden from him almost at once by the man’s massive head; but he had seen enough, more than enough, to verify a certain suspicion which had long been quartered at the back of his brain.

Stealthily he drew himself back from the cliff edge, and sat up on the damp grass.  Again his eyes swept the horizon; there was something of a glare in them.  He was drenched through and through by the rain, but he did not know it.  Had Muriel seen him at that moment she might have likened him with a shudder to an eagle that viewed its quarry from afar.

He returned to the house without further lingering, and spent the two hours that followed in prowling ceaselessly up and down his library.