Nor was that all; between that part of the debris where the corpse was perched and the sand below was one of those long pools of sea-water edged by shingles, which are common features of that coast.  It seemed that Destiny or Circumstance, more pitiless than Fate and Hell, determined on our ruin, had forgotten nothing.

The contour of the cove; the way in which the debris had been thrown across the path we now must follow in order to reach the only place of egress; the way in which the hideous spectacle of Wynne and the proof of his guilt had been placed, so that to pass it without seeing it the passenger must go blindfold; the brilliance of the moon, intensified by being reflected from the sea; the fulness of the high tide, and the swell—­all was complete!  As I stood there with clenched teeth, like a rat in a trap, a wind seemed to come blowing through my soul, freezing and burning.  I cursed Superstition that was slaying us both.  And I should have cursed Heaven but for the touch of Winnie’s clasping fingers, silky and soft as when I first felt them as a child in the churchyard.

‘What has happened?’ asked she, looking into my face.

‘Only a slip of my foot,’ I said, recovering my presence of mind.

‘But why do you turn back?’

’I cannot bring myself to part from you under this delicious moon, Winnie, if you will stay a few minutes longer.  Let us go and sit on that very boulder where little Hal proposed to you.’

‘But you want to go into the church,’ said Winifred, as we moved back towards the boulder.

’No, I will leave that till the morning.  I would leave anything till the morning, to have a few minutes longer with you on the sands.  Try to imagine that we are children again, and that I am not the despised rich man but little Hal the cripple.’

Winifred’s eyes, which had begun to look very troubled, sparkled with delight.

‘But,’ said she with a sigh, as we sat down on the boulder, ’I’m afraid we sha’n’t be able to stay long.  See how the tide is rising, and the sea is wild.  The tides just now, father says, come right up to the cliff in the cove, and once locked in between Flinty Point and Needle Point there is no escape.’

‘Yes, darling,’ I muttered to myself, drawing her to me and burying my face in her bosom, ‘there is one escape, only one.’

For death seemed to me the only escape from a tragedy far, far worse than death.

If she made me any answer I heard it not; for, as I sat there with closed eyes, schemes of escape fluttered before me and were dismissed at the rate of a thousand a second.  A fiery photograph of the cove was burning within my brain, my mind was absorbed in examining every cranny and every protuberance in the semicircular wall of the cliff there depicted; over and over again I was examining that brain-picture, though I knew every inch of it, and knew there was not in the cliff-wall foothold for a squirrel.