he flashed out.

"Let us shake hands, Kelly," I said,... "and be very good friends.
Will you?"

He gave me his hand rather shyly.

"We will never speak of her again," I said,... "unless you desire
it. You have had a terrible lesson in caution; I need say no more.
Only remember that I have trusted you with a secret concerning
Buckhurst's conspiracy."

His firm hand tightened on mine, then he walked away, steadily, head
high. And I went out to saddle my horse for a canter across the moor
to Point Paradise.

It was a gray day, with a hint of winter in the air, and a wind that
set the gorse rustling like tissue-paper. Up aloft the sun glimmered,
a white spot in a silvery smother; pale lights lay on moorland and
water; the sea tumbled over the bar, boiling like a flood of liquid
lead from which the spindrift curled and blew into a haze that buried
the island of Groix and turned the anchored iron-clad to a phantom.

A day for a gallop, if ever there was such a day!--a day to wash out
care from a troubled mind and cleanse it in the whipping, reeking, wet
east wind--a day for a fox! And I rose in my saddle and shouted aloud
as a red fox shot out of the gorse and galloped away across the
endless moorland, with the feathers of a mallard still sticking to his
whiskers.

Oh, what a gallop, with risk enough, too; for I did not know the coast
moors; and the deep clefts from the cliffs cut far inland, so that eye
and ear and bridle-hand were tense and ready to catch danger ere it
ingulfed us in some sea-churned crevice hidden by the bracken. And how
the gray gulls squealed, high whirling over us, and the wild ducks in
the sedge rose with clapping wings, craning their necks, only to swing
overhead in circles, whimpering, and drop, with pendent legs and wings
aslant, back into the bog from which we startled them.

A ride into an endless gray land, sweet with sea-scents, rank with the
perfume of salty green things; a ride into a land of gushing winds,
wet as spray, strong and caressing, too, and full of mischief; winds
that set miles of sedge rippling; sudden winds, that turned still
pools to geysers and set the yellow gorse flowers flying; winds that
rushed up with a sea-roar like the sound in shells, then, sudden, died
away, to leave the furrowed clover motionless and the tall reeds still
as death.

So, by strange ways and eccentric circles, like the aerial paths of
homing sea-birds, I came at last to the spot I had set out