t reveals or hides the activities of men
it changes them most curiously. The difference between man in day, man
in night, is acute.

The arrival of darkness always meant something to the Rev. Peter
Uniacke, whose cure of souls now held him far from the swarming alleys
and the docks in which his early work had been done. He seldom failed to
give this visitor, so strange and soft-footed, some slight greeting.
Sometimes his welcome was a sigh, sometimes a prayer, sometimes a
clenching of the hands, a smile, a pause in his onward walk. Looking
backward along his past he could see his tall figure in many different
places, aware of the first footfalls of the night, now alone and
thinking of night's allegory of man's end, now in company, when the talk
insensibly changed its character, flowing into deeper, more mysterious
or confidential channels. Peter Uniacke had listened to informal
confessions, too, as the night fell, confessions of sin that at first
surprised him, that at last could no longer surprise him. And he had
confessed himself, before the altar of the twilight, and had wondered
why it is that sometimes Nature seems to have the power of absolution,
even as God has it.

Now, at the age of thirty-two, he heard the footsteps of night on a
windy evening of November. They drew near to the wall of the churchyard
in which stood the sturdy and rugged building where now he ministered,
on a little isle set lonely in a harsh and dangerous northern sea. He
listened to them, leaning his arms along this wall, by which the grey
and sleepless waves sang loudly. In the churchyard, growing gradually
dim and ethereal, were laid many bodies from which the white vampires of
the main had sucked out the souls. Here mouldered fisher lads, who had
whistled over the nets, and dreamed rough dreams of winning island girls
and breeding hardy children. Here reposed old limbs of salty mariners,
who had for so long defied the ocean that when they knew themselves
taken at the last, they turned their rugged faces down to their enemy
with a stony and an ironic wonder. And here, too, among these cast-up
bodies of the drowned, lay many women who had loved the prey of the sea,
and kissed the cheeks turned acrid by its winds and waters. Some of them
had died from heart-sickness, cursing the sea. Some had faded, withering
like the pale sand roses beside the sea. Some had lived to old age by
empty hearths, in the sound of the sea.

Inscriptions faded up