The tide was rising with the moon; the roar of it swelled and sank like the mighty breathing of a giant.  The waters shone in the gathering light in a vast silver shimmer almost too dazzling for the eye to endure.  In another hour it would be as light as day.  A few dim clouds were floating over the stars, filmy wisps that had escaped from the ragged edges of a dark curtain that had veiled the sun before its time.  The breeze that had blown them free wandered far overhead; below, especially on the shore, it was almost tropically warm, and no breath of air seemed to stir.

Swiftly went the flitting figure, like a brown moth drawn by the glitter of the moonlight.  There was no other living thing in sight.

All the lights of Spear Point village had gone out long since.  Rufus’s cottage, with its slip of garden on the shelf of the cliff, was no more than a faint blur of white against the towering sandstone behind.  No light had shone there all the evening, for the daylight had not died till ten, and he was often in bed at that hour.  The fishing fleet would be out again with the dawn if the weather held, or even earlier; and the hours of sleep were precious.

Down on the rocks on the edge of the sleeping pool a grey shadow lurked amidst darker shadows.  A faint scent of cigarette smoke hung about the silver beach—­a drifting suggestion intangible as the magic of the night.

Could it have been this faint, floating fragrance that drew the flitting brown moth by way of the quicksand, swiftly, swiftly, along the moonlit shore travelling with mysterious certainty, irresistibly attracted?  There was no pause in its rapid progress, though the course it followed was tortuous.  It pursued, with absolute confidence, an invisible, winding path.  And ever the roar of the sea grew louder and louder.

Across the pool, carved in the blackness of the outstretched curving scimitar of rock, there was a ledge, washed smooth by every tide, but a foot or more above the water when the tide was out.  It was inaccessible save by way of the pool itself, and yet it had the look of a pathway cut in the face of the Spear Point Rock.  The moonlight gleamed upon its wet surface.  In the very centre of the great curving rock there was a deeper darkness that might have been a cave.

It must have been after midnight when the little brown figure that had flitted so securely through the quicksand came with its noiseless feet over the tumble of rocks that lay about the pool, and the shadow that lurked in the shadows rose up and became a man.

They met on the edge of the pool, but there was about the lesser form a hesitancy of movement, a shyness, almost a wildness, that seemed as if it would end in flight.

But the man remained quite motionless, and in a moment or two the impulse passed or was controlled.  Two quivering hands came forth to him as if in supplication.

“So you are waiting!” a low voice said.