own, with his face turned to the sea.

It was a white, radiant night, such as he had seen in the tropics. Only
here, in the north, his vision reached to greater distances. Churchill
lay lifeless in its pool of light; the ship hung like a black
silhouette in the distance, with a cloud of jet-black smoke rising
straight up from its funnels, and spreading out high up against the
sky, a huge, ebon monster that cast its shadow for half a mile over the
Bay. The shadow held Philip's eyes. Now it was like a gigantic face,
now like a monster beast--now it reached out in the form of a great
threatening hand, as though somewhere in the mystery of the north it
sought a spirit-victim as potent as itself.

Then the spell of it was broken. From the end of the shadow, which
reached almost to the base of the cliff on which Philip sat, there came
a sound. It was a clear, metallic sound that left the vibration of
steel in the air, and Philip leaned over the edge of the rock. Below
him the shadow was broken into a pool of rippling starlight. He heard
the faint dip of paddles, and suddenly a canoe shot from the shadow out
into the clear light of the moon and stars.

It was a large canoe. In it he could make out four figures. Three of
them were paddling; the fourth sat motionless in the bow. They passed
under him swiftly, guiding their canoe so that it was soon hidden in
the shelter of the cliff. By the faint reflections cast by the
disturbed water, Philip saw that the occupants of the canoe had made an
effort to conceal themselves by following the course of the dense
shadow. Only the chance sound had led him to observe them.

Under ordinary circumstances the passing of a strange canoe at night
would have had no significance for him. But at the present time it
troubled him. The manner of its approach through the shadow, the
strange quiet of its occupants, the stealth with which they had shot
the canoe under the cliff, were all unusual. Could the incident have
anything to do with Jeanne and Pierre?

He waited until he heard the tiny bell in his watch tinkle the
half-hour, and then he set out slowly over the moonlit rocks to the
north. Jeanne and Pierre would surely come from that direction. It was
impossible to miss them. He walked without sound in his moccasins,
keeping close to the edge of the cliff so that he could look out over
the Bay. Two or three hundred yards beyond the big rock the sea-wall
swung in sharply, disclosing the open