tone she began to climb till she reached the point where she had sat
that morning. If the mud had taken Bompard, had he cried out? If so, La
Touche would have heard his cries, for the caves were not so far from
the Lizard rocks.

La Touche was nowhere to be seen, but she had no fear about him, or only
the fear that he would come back. Bompard was gone. Bompard was dead,
she knew it as though she had seen him engulfed, and she was here alone,
in this place, with La Touche.

She put her hand to her side automatically to make sure that the knife
was there. Then she sat with her eyes fixed on the distant islands,
haze-purple in the light of the westering sun.

The thought of the boat on the beach came to her with the idea that she
might launch it and escape, make for the islands and put all that sea
between herself and the man she hated. But she could not launch the boat
single-handed and, if she could, it would have been impossible to work
it single-handed with those big oars.

She could see the boat from where she sat and the line of the beach
leading away past the seal-nursery and the sea elephant strand to the
rocks that formed the north-eastern horn of the bay. In stormy weather
those rocks would be invisible in the smoke of the breakers, to-day they
were clearly defined. She could see the great seals as they moved slowly
hither and thither and the ship's figure-head as it stood to this side
of them and, like a pin point of white the great white skull on the
sands, a desolate scene, but almost benign when compared to the savagery
of rocks and cliffs visible on her other side and that sinister plain,
where the death traps were set and waiting with the patience of
malignity for what might come to feed them.

She had fought the human failing that makes men brood and trouble about
the future, a failing that is mostly born of houses and artificial life;
already the struggle against it was less. She was coming more and more
under that which has dominion over all things that live in the open and
have to fight for life--the moment. If she had examined her own mind she
would have found that the death of Bompard, of which she felt certain,
affected her far less than it would have done some days ago, that her
desire to escape to the islands was caused by the hatred of La Touche
more than by fear of the future with him.

She would have found that her capacity for hatred had increased and also
her dangerous qualities, and she