With that parting caution, he left me.

The interval of expectation, short as it was when reckoned by the measure of time, assumed formidable proportions when reckoned by the measure of suspense.  This was one of the occasions on which the invaluable habit of smoking becomes especially precious and consolatory.  I lit a cigar, and sat down on the slope of the beach.

The sunlight poured its unclouded beauty on every object that I could see.  The exquisite freshness of the air made the mere act of living and breathing a luxury.  Even the lonely little bay welcomed the morning with a show of cheerfulness; and the bared wet surface of the quicksand itself, glittering with a golden brightness, hid the horror of its false brown face under a passing smile.  It was the finest day I had seen since my return to England.

The turn of the tide came, before my cigar was finished.  I saw the preliminary heaving of the Sand, and then the awful shiver that crept over its surface—­as if some spirit of terror lived and moved and shuddered in the fathomless deeps beneath.  I threw away my cigar, and went back again to the rocks.

My directions in the memorandum instructed me to feel along the line traced by the stick, beginning with the end which was nearest to the beacon.

I advanced, in this manner, more than half way along the stick, without encountering anything but the edges of the rocks.  An inch or two further on, however, my patience was rewarded.  In a narrow little fissure, just within reach of my forefinger, I felt the chain.  Attempting, next, to follow it, by touch, in the direction of the quicksand, I found my progress stopped by a thick growth of seaweed—­which had fastened itself into the fissure, no doubt, in the time that had elapsed since Rosanna Spearman had chosen her hiding-place.

It was equally impossible to pull up the seaweed, or to force my hand through it.  After marking the spot indicated by the end of the stick which was placed nearest to the quicksand, I determined to pursue the search for the chain on a plan of my own.  My idea was to “sound” immediately under the rocks, on the chance of recovering the lost trace of the chain at the point at which it entered the sand.  I took up the stick, and knelt down on the brink of the South Spit.

In this position, my face was within a few feet of the surface of the quicksand.  The sight of it so near me, still disturbed at intervals by its hideous shivering fit, shook my nerves for the moment.  A horrible fancy that the dead woman might appear on the scene of her suicide, to assist my search—­an unutterable dread of seeing her rise through the heaving surface of the sand, and point to the place—­forced itself into my mind, and turned me cold in the warm sunlight.  I own I closed my eyes at the moment when the point of the stick first entered the quicksand.

The instant afterwards, before the stick could have been submerged more than a few inches, I was free from the hold of my own superstitious terror, and was throbbing with excitement from head to foot.  Sounding blindfold, at my first attempt—­at that first attempt I had sounded right!  The stick struck the chain.