It was, I dare say, half a minute before I regained my self-possession.  But for two circumstances, I should have thought I had been awakened by some new and vivid form of nightmare.  First, the flap of my tent, which I had shut carefully when I retired, was now unfastened; and, second, I could still perceive, with a sharpness that excluded any theory of hallucination, the smell of hot metal and of burning oil.  The conclusion was obvious.  I had been awakened by some one flashing a bull’s-eye lantern in my face.  It had been but a flash, and away.  He had seen my face, and then gone.  I asked myself the object of so strange a proceeding, and the answer came pat.  The man, whoever he was, had thought to recognize me, and he had not.  There was another question unresolved; and to this, I may say, I feared to give an answer; if he had recognized me, what would he have done?

My fears were immediately diverted from myself, for I saw that I had been visited in a mistake; and I became persuaded that some dreadful danger threatened the pavilion.  It required some nerve to issue forth into the black and intricate thicket which surrounded and overhung the den; but I groped my way to the links, drenched with rain, beaten upon and deafened by the gusts, and fearing at every step to lay my hand upon some lurking adversary.  The darkness was so complete that I might have been surrounded by an army and yet none the wiser, and the uproar of the gale so loud that my hearing was as useless as my sight.

For the rest of that night, which seemed interminably long, I patrolled the vicinity of the pavilion, without seeing a living creature or hearing any noise but the concert of the wind, the sea, and the rain.  A light in the upper story filtered through a cranny of the shutter, and kept me company till the approach of dawn.

V

With the first peep of day, I retired from the open to my old lair among the sand hills, there to await the coming of my wife.  The morning was gray, wild, and melancholy; the wind moderated before sunrise, and then went about, and blew in puffs from the shore; the sea began to go down, but the rain still fell without mercy.  Over all the wilderness of links there was not a creature to be seen.  Yet I felt sure the neighborhood was alive with skulking foes.  The light that had been so suddenly and surprisingly flashed upon my face as I lay sleeping, and the hat that had been blown ashore by the wind from over Graden Floe, were two speaking signals of the peril that environed Clara and the party in the pavilion.

It was, perhaps, half-past seven, or nearer eight, before I saw the door open, and that dear figure come toward me in the rain.  I was waiting for her on the beach before she had crossed the sand hills.

“I have had such trouble to come!” she cried.  “They did not wish me to go walking in the rain.”

“Clara,” I said, “you are not frightened!”