As I picked up the letters that had been scattered from the casket, she said,

’I cannot get that dreadful curse out of my head; to think that the children of the despoiler should be cursed by God, and cursed by your father, and yet they are as innocent as I am.’

‘Best to forget it,’ said I, standing still, for I dared not move towards the debris.

‘We must get on, Henry,’ said she, ’for look, the tide is unusually high to-night.  You have turned back, I see, because Flinty Point is already deep in the water.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ’I must turn Needle Point with you.  But as to the sacrilege, let us dismiss it from our minds; what cannot be helped had better be forgotten.’

I then cautiously turned the corner of the debris, leading her after me in such a way that my body acted as a screen.  Then my eyes encountered a spectacle whose horror chilled my blood, and haunts me to this day in my dreams.  About twelve feet above the general level of the sand, buried to the breast behind a mass of green sward fallen from the graveyard, stood the dead body of Wynne, amid a confused heap of earth, gravestones, trees, shrubs, bones, and shattered coffins.  Bolt upright it stood, staring with horribly distorted features, as in terror, the crown of the head smashed by a fallen gravestone.  Upon his breast glittered the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross, sparkling in the light of the moon, and seeming to be endowed with conscious life.  It was evident that he had, while groping his way out of the crypt, slung the cross around his neck, in order to free his hands.  I shudder as I recall the spectacle.  The sight would have struck Winifred dead, or sent her raving mad, on the spot; but she had not turned the corner, and I had just time to wheel sharply round, and thrust my body between her and the spectacle.  The dog saw it, and, foaming with terror, pointed at it.

‘I beg your pardon, Winifred,’ I said, falling upon her and pushing her back.

Then I stood paralysed as the full sinister meaning of the situation broke in upon my mind.  Had the debris fallen in any other way I might have saved Winifred from seeing the most cruel feature of the hideous spectacle, the cross, the evidence of her father’s sacrilege.  I might, perhaps, on some pretence, have left her on this side the debris, and turning the corner, have mounted the heap and removed the cross gleaming in hideous mockery on the dead man’s breast, and giving back the moonbeams in a cross of angry fire.  One glance, however, had shown me that before this could be done, there was a wall of slippery sward to climb, for the largest portion of the churchyard soil had broken off in one lump.  In falling, it had turned but half over, and then had slid down sideways, presenting to the climber a facet or sward nearly perpendicular and a dozen feet high.  Wedged in between the jaggy top of this block and the wall of the cliff was the corpse, showing that Wynne had been standing by the fissure of the cliff at the moment when it widened into a landslip.