The archway was indeed low, and they were forced to crouch and almost crawl up the first short flight of steps.  But after this Honoria, following Trevarthen’s lantern round and up the spiral way, found the roof heightening above her, and soon emerged into a gloomy chamber fitted with cupboards and water-tanks—­the provision room.  From this a ladder led straight up through a man-hole in the ceiling to the light-room store, set round with shining oil-tanks and stocked with paint-pots, brushes, cans, signalling flags, coils of rope, bags of cotton waste, tool-chests. . . .  A second ladder brought them to the kitchen, and a third to the sleeping-room; and here the light of the lantern streamed down on their heads through the open man-hole above them.  They heard, too, the roar of the ventilator, and the ting-ting, regular and sharp, of the small bell reporting that the machinery revolved.

Above, in the blaze of the great lenses, old Pezzack and the second under-keeper welcomed them.  The pair had been watching and discussing the light with true professional pride; and Taffy drew up at the head of the ladder and stared at it, and nodded his slow approbation.  The glare forced Honoria back against the glass wall, and she caught at its lattice for support.

But she pulled herself together, ashamed of her weakness, and glad that Taffy had not perceived it.

“This satisfies you?” she whispered.

He faced round on her with a slow smile.  “No,” he said, “this light-house is useless.”

“Useless?”

“You remember the wreck—­that wreck—­the Samaritan? She came ashore beneath here; right beneath our feet; by no fault or carelessness.  A light-house on a coast like this—­a coast without a harbour—­is a joke set in a death-trap, to make game of dying men.”

“But since the coast has no harbour—­”

“I would build one.  Look at this,” he pulled a pencil and paper from his pocket and rapidly sketched the outlines of the Bristol Channel.  “What is that?  A bag.  Suppose a vessel taken in the mouth of it; a bag with death along the narrowing sides and death waiting at the end—­no deep-water harbour—­no chance anywhere.  And the tides!  You know the rhyme—­”

     “From Padstow Point to Lundy Light
      Is a watery grave by day or night.”

“Yes, there’s Lundy”—­he jotted down the position of the island—­ “Hit off the lee of Lundy, if you can, and drop hook, and pray God it holds!”

“But this harbour?  What would it cost?”

“I dare say a million of money; perhaps more.  But I work it out at less—­at Porthquin, for instance, or Lundy itself, or even at St. Ives.”

“A million!” she laughed.  “Now I see the boy I used to know—­the boy of dreams.”

He turned on her gravely.  She was exceedingly beautiful, standing there in her black habit, bareheaded in the glare of the lenses, standing with head thrown back, with eyes challenging the past, and a faint glow on either cheek.  But he had no eyes for her beauty.