He thought of the dead man in his chamber down below.  Could he be in the habit of walking of a night?  He thought of ghosts, of which, if popular belief was anything to go by, Sark was full; and there was nothing to hinder them coming across to L’Etat for their Sabbat.  And he thought of monster devil-fish climbing, loathsome and soundless, about the dark rocks.

He longed for a pair of Sark eyes, and shrank down into a hollow under the ridge to watch this thing, with something of a creepy chill between his shoulder-blades.

There was certainly something lighter than the surrounding darkness down below, and it moved.  It turned the corner and flitted along the slope, slowly but surely, in the direction of his shelter.  Its mode of progression, from the little he could make out in the darkness, was just such as he would have looked for in a huge octopus hauling itself along by its tentacles over the out-cropping rock-bones.

He could not rest there.  He must see.  He crawled along the ridge as quietly as he could manage it, and would have felt happier, whatever it was, spirit or monster, if he had had his gun.  Now and again it stopped, and when it stopped he lay flat to the ground and held his breath, lest it should discover him.  When it went on, he went on.

When he came to the end of the ridge he saw that the nebulous something had apparently stopped just where his house must be.

And then, every sense on the strain, he heard his own name called softly, and he laughed to himself for very joy of it, and lay still to hear it again, and laughed once more to think that in her simplicity she still thought of him as “Mr. Gard.”  He would teach her to call him “Steen,” as his mother used to do.

Then he got up quickly and cried, as softly as herself, but with joy and laughter in his voice—­

“Why, Nance!  My dear, I was not sure whether you were a ghost or a devil-fish;” and he sprang down towards her.

And then, to his amazement, he saw that she was clad only in the clinging white garment in which he had seen her swim.

Her next words confounded him.

“Is Bernel here?”

“Bernel, Nance?  No, dear, he is not here.  Why—­”

“Did he not get here last night?” she jerked sharply.

“No.  No one.  I was hoping—­”

But she had sunk down against the great stones of the shelter, with her hands before her face.

“Mon Gyu, mon Gyu!  Then he is dead!  Oh, my poor one!  My dear one!”

“Nance!  Nance!  What is it all, dearest?  Did Bernel try to come across last night—­”

“Yes, yes!  He would come.  He said you must be starving.  We were all anxious about you—­”

“And he tried to swim across?”

“Yes, yes!  And he is drowned!  Oh, my poor, poor boy!”

She was shaking with the sudden chill of dreadful loss.  He stooped, and felt inside the shelter with a long arm for the old woollen cloak and wrapped her carefully in it.  He raked out the blanket and made her sit with it tucked about her feet.  And she was passive in his hands, with thought as yet for nothing but her loss.