A chill wind blew across the ramparts bringing with it the scent and the sound of the sea.  There was no moon in the sky tonight, only the clouds flying over the stars, obscuring and revealing them alternately, making their light weirdly vague and fitful.  Across the park an owl called persistently, its eerie hoot curiously like the cry of a human voice through the rustling night.  The trees were murmuring together down by the lake as though some mysterious news were passing to and fro among them.  And once more, alone on his castle walls, Saltash paced restlessly up and down.

It was his last night at Burchester, so he told himself, for many a year to come.  The fever for change was upon him.  He had played his last card and lost.  It was characteristic of the man to turn his back upon his losses and be gone.  His soul had begun to yearn for the wide spaces, and it was in answer to the yearning that he had come up to this eagle’s eyrie a second time.  He could not be still, and the feeling of walls around him was somehow unbearable.  But he expected no vision tonight.  He walked in darkness.

Down in the harbour his yacht was waiting, and he wondered cynically what whim kept him from joining her.  Why was he staying to drain the cup to the dregs—­he who had the whole world to choose from?  He had sent his message, he had made his sacrifice—­at what a cost not even Maud would ever know.  It was the first voluntary sacrifice he had ever made, he reflected ironically, and he marvelled at himself to find that he cared so much.  For, after all, what was it he had sacrificed?  Nothing worth having, so he told himself.  He had possessed her childish adoration, but her love—­never!  And, very curiously, it was her love that he had wanted.  Actually, for the first time in his life, no lesser thing had appealed to him.  Jaded and weary with long experience, he owned now to a longing for that at which all his life long he had scoffed.  The longing was not to be satisfied.  He was to go empty away.  But yet the very fact that he had known it had in some inexplicable fashion purified him from earthly desires.  He had as it were reached up and touched the spiritual, and that which was not spiritual had crumbled away below him.  He looked back upon the desert through which all his life he had travelled, and saw only sand.

The sound of the turret-door banging behind him recalled him to his surroundings.  He awoke to the fact that the wind was chill, and that a drift of rain was coming in from the sea.  With an impatient shrug he turned.  Why was he lingering here like a drunken reveller at a table of spilt wine?  He would go down to his yacht and find Larpent—­Larpent who had also loved and lost.  They would go out on the turn of the tide—­the two losers in the game of life—­and leave the spilt wine behind them.

Impulsively he strode back along the ramparts.  The game was over, and he would never play again; but at least he would face the issue like a man.  No one, not even Larpent, should ever see him flinch.  So he reached the turret-door, and came abruptly to a halt.