Out over the waste of heaving water, where the moonbeams turned the small rippling waves to the resemblance of netted links of silver or steel, the horizon stretched sharply clear and definite, like a line drawn under the finished chapter of vision.

There was a gentle murmur of the inflowing tide among the loose stones and pebbles fringing the beach,--but to Helmsley's ears it sounded like the miserable moaning of a broken heart,--the wail of a sorrowful spirit in torture.

He went on and on, with no very distinct idea of where he was going,--he simply continued to walk automatically like one in a dream.
He did not know the time, but guessed it must be somewhere about midnight.

The road was quite deserted, and its loneliness was to him, in his present over-wrought condition, appalling.

Desolation seemed to involve the whole earth in gloom,--the trees stood out in the white shine of the moon like dark shrouded ghosts waving their cerements to and fro,--the fields and hills on either side of him were bare and solitary, and the gleam of the ocean was cold and cheerless as a "Dead Man's Pool." Slowly he plodded along, with a thousand disjointed fragments of thought and memory teasing his brain, all part and parcel of his recent experiences,--he seemed to have lived through a whole history of strange events since the herb-gatherer, Matt Peke, had befriended him on the road,--and the most curious impression of all was that he had somehow lost his own identity for ever.