A shaft of moonlight smote through a slit in the stone wall as he rounded the corner of the stair.  It lay like a shining sword across his path, and for a second he paused.  Then he passed over it, sure-footed and confident, and plunged again into darkness.  When he reached the end of the descent, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were alight with a strange fire.  He pulled upon the door and put aside the thick curtain with the swift movements of a man who can brook no delay.  He passed into the long, dim room beyond with its single red lamp burning at the far end.  He prepared to pass on to the door that led out upon the gallery and so to the grand staircase.  But before he had gone half-a-dozen paces he stopped.  It was no sound that arrested, no visible circumstance of any sort.  Yet, as if at a word of command, he halted.  His quick look swept around the room like the gleam of a rapier, and suddenly he swung upon his heel, facing that still, red light.

Seconds passed before he moved again.  Then swiftly and silently he walked up the room.  Close to the lamp was a deep settee on which the spots of a leopard skin showed in weird relief.  At one end of the settee, against the leopard skin, something gold was shining.  Saltash’s look was fixed upon it as he drew near.

He reached the settee treading noiselessly.  He stood beside it, looking down.  And over his dark face with its weary lines and cynical mouth, its melancholy and its bitterness, there came a light such as neither man nor woman had ever seen upon it before.  For there before him, curled up like a tired puppy, her tumbled, golden hair lying in ringlets over the leopard skin, was Toby, asleep in the dim, red lamplight.

For minutes he stood and gazed upon her before she awoke.  For minutes that strange glory came and went over his watching face.  He did not stir, did not seem even to breathe.  But the fact of his presence must have pierced her consciousness at last, for in the end quite quietly, supremely naturally, the blue eyes opened and fixed upon him.

“Hullo!” said Toby sleepily.  “Time to get up?”

And then, in a moment, she had sprung upright on the couch, swift dismay on her face.

“I—­I thought we were on the yacht!  I—­I—­I never meant to go to sleep here!  I came to speak to you, sir.  I wanted to see you.”

He put a restraining hand upon her thin young shoulder, and his touch vibrated as with some unknown force controlled.

“All right, Nonette!” he said, and his voice had the same quality; it was reassuring but oddly unsteady.  “Sorry I kept you waiting.”

She looked at him.  Her face was quivering.  “I’ve had—­a hell of a time,” she said pathetically.  “Been here hours—­thought you’d never come.  Your man—­your man said I wasn’t to disturb you.”

“Damn the fool!” said Saltash.

She broke into a breathless laugh.  “That’s—­that’s just what I said.  But I thought—­I thought perhaps—­you’d rather—­rather I waited.”  She shivered suddenly.  “I don’t like this place.  Can you take me somewhere else?”