violence of the waves, the fierce turmoil of striving elements.

The tide was extraordinarily high--such a tide as he believed he had
never seen before in summer. He stood in the pouring rain and looked
first one way, then the other, with a quick birdlike scrutiny, but as
far as his eyes could pierce he saw only an empty desolation of waters.
There seemed none in need of his help that night.

"I wonder if Rufus is awake," he speculated to the angry tumult.

Nearly three miles out from the Spear Point there was a lighthouse with
a revolving light. That light shone towards him now, casting a weird
radiance across the tossing water, and as if in accompaniment to the
warning gleam he heard the deep toll of the bell-buoy that rocked upon
the swell.

Adam turned about. "I'll go and knock up Rufus," he decided. "It'd be a
shame to miss a night like this."

Again the lightning rent the sky, and the whole great outline of the
Spear Point was revealed in one awful second of intolerable radiance.
Adam's keen eye chanced to be upon it, and he saw it in such detail as
the strongest sunlight could never have achieved. The brightness
dazzled, almost shocked him, but there was something besides the
brightness that sent an odd sensation through him--a curious, sick
feeling as if he had suddenly received a blow between the shoulders. For
in that fraction of time he had seen something which reason, clamouring
against the evidence of his senses, declared to be the impossible. He
had seen a human figure--the figure of his son--clinging to the naked
face of the rock, hanging between sea and sky where scarcely a bird
could have found foothold, while something--a grey, indistinguishable
burden--hung limp across his shoulder, weighing him down.

The thunder was still rolling around him when with a great shake Adam
pulled himself together.

"I'm dreaming!" he told himself angrily. "A man couldn't ever climb the
Spear Point, let alone live on a ledge that wouldn't harbour a sea-gull
if he did. I'll go round to Rufus. I'll go round and knock him up."

With the words he tramped off through the rushing rain, and leaving the
quay, struck upwards along the cliff in the direction of the narrow path
that ran down to Rufus's dwelling above the Spear Point Caves.

Despite the spareness of his frame, he climbed the ascent with a
rapidity that made him gasp. The wind also was against him, blowing in
strong gusts, and the raging of the sea below w