ends. Was she not great-granddaughter to
that admiral who at Trafalgar, when both his legs were shattered by
chain-shot, bade his men place him in a barrel of bran that he might go
on commanding, in the hour of defeat, to the end?

And yet as Claire stood there, her eyes sweeping the sea for an as yet
invisible craft, her heart seemed to beat rhythmically to the last verse
of a noble English poem which the governess of her twin daughters had
made them recite to her that very morning. How did it run? Aloud she
murmured:

"Yet this inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore--"

and then she stopped, her quivering lips refusing to form the two
concluding lines.

To Claire de Wissant, that moving cry from a man's soul was not dulled
by familiarity, or hackneyed by common usage, and just now it found an
intolerably faithful echo in her sad, rebellious heart, intensifying the
anguish born of a secret and very bitter renunciation.

With an abrupt, restless movement she turned and walked on till her way
along the path was barred by a curious obstacle. This was a small
red-brick tower, built within a few feet of the edge of the cliff. It
was an ugly blot on the beautiful stretch of down, all the uglier that
the bricks and tiles had not yet had time to lose their hardness of line
and colour in the salt wind.

On the cliff side, the small circular building, open to wind, sky and
sea, formed the unnatural apex of a natural stairway which led steeply,
almost vertically, down to a deep land-locked cove below. The irregular
steps carved by nature out of the chalk had been strengthened, and a
rough protection added by means of knotted ropes fixed on either side of
the dangerous descent.

In the days when the steps had started sheer from a cleft in the cliff
path, Jacques de Wissant had never used this way of reaching a spot
which till last year had been his property, and his favourite
bathing-place; and he had also, in those same quiet days which now
seemed so long ago, forbidden his daughters to use that giddy way. But
Claire was a fearless woman; and she had always preferred the
dangerous, ladder-like stairs which seemed, when gazed at from below, to
hang 'twixt sky and sea.

Now, however, she rarely availed herself of the right retained by her
husband of using one of the two keys which unlocked the door set in the
new brick tower, for the cove--only by courtesy could it be called a
bay--had been chosen, owing to