It was past midnight, and the summer moonlight sparkled on the waves as a little boat, with its sail puffed out by a brisk breeze, came gliding, conspirator-like, toward that part of the Braceton domain that runs along by the sea. It was the night after Roscoria's school broke up, and the first use the master made of his holiday was this--to arrange to run off with Miss Lyndis. There seemed nothing else to be done; the admiral would not yield, the lady would not change her mind, and the lover would not be content to wait. So the young people exchanged letters, and the result was this boat. Tregurtha was in the affair as well, though he strongly disapproved of it. His love of adventure had conquered his conscience; and he was, besides, confident that Roscoria would end all by a blunder if not backed by a cool-headed friend. So here was Tregurtha, steering the boat into a certain safe and sandy cove well in the shadow, where he knew that the eye even of an admiral could not penetrate, whilst Roscoria fetched his lady. Roscoria's heart was on land before his legs, and again and again had he mounted in spirit up that steep pathway, up the cliffs from the beach to the side of the house, where there would be one light in a window, one wakeful inmate to steal out to him through the unbolted shutters and the gate she would have left ajar. "Are we late?" he asked his friend. "No, early," said Tregurtha. "Will she be ready?" "I have no means of knowing, my dear fellow." "What are we to do if she is not?" "Wait." The boat ground on the pebbly beach, and Dick admonished the lover _sotto voce_---- "Don't--now _don't_ sentimentalize on the way; every minute is valuable; the admiral is not deaf, and the lady's box is sure to be heavy." Roscoria was off like a chamois-hunter. Tregurtha sat on the beach and smoked a pipe, stretching his legs in great tranquillity. Not that he was ignorant that Rosetta's window also had a light in it, but he knew it did not shine for him, and, considering all things, he thought it wiser to look in the opposite direction. It was soon, in reality, that two figures began to descend the cliff-path. Roscoria first, bearing a modest trunk on his shoulder, and looking back each moment to see if Lyndis knew her way in the moonlight. Lyndis herself was muffled up in a large cloak. She did not seem at all nervous. All that Tregurtha noticed, as she stepped into the boat and bade him "good-evening" with a sort of pathetic courtesy, was that her figure stood straight and firm, and that she trod the rocks in the uncertain light with Devonshire decision. The lieutenant was secretly a trifle shocked by the coolness of the young couple. Feeling himself the incarnation of duplicity and insubordination, he would have liked a more remorseful attitude in the fugitives themselves.