caught gleams at times which
might be oar-blades or might be only the upfling from the perils below.
The tide was ebbing, and soon the black fangs with which it was strewn
would be showing.

At times he convinced himself that the brief gleams moved; but when, to
ease his eyes of the intolerable strain, he looked up at the stars, it
seemed to him that they moved also, and so he could not be sure.

But surely there was a gleam that seemed to move and come fitfully
towards him--or was it only star-shine dancing on the waves of the Race
which always ran against the tide?

He stood to watch, then lost the gleam, and crouched again disappointed.

The boat must come round Quette d'Amont, the great pile of rock that lay
off the eastern corner, and the first glimpse he could hope to get of it
in the darkness would be there.

Then, suddenly, in that curious way in which one sometimes sees more out
of the tail of one's eye than out of the front of it, he got an
impression--and with it a start--of something moving noiselessly among
the tumbled rocks below on his left.

It was a dark night, but the glory of the stars lifted it out of the
ebony-ruler category. It was a wide, thin, lofty darkness, but still
black enough along the sides of his rock, and down there it seemed to
him that something moved, something dim and shadowy and silent.

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