The wind carried her high and powerful notes. The man in the hole flourished his arm with the most cordial, grateful gesticulation, and the young lady walked swiftly towards the little town which lay in an embrasure in the great cliff on her right. The road was steep, wide, and formed an angle. It went like a steeple into the sky. People often paused to admire the gulls floating round about and in and out the liquid blue of this fanciful aerial spire. Nothing of the town was visible till almost the summit of the great gap had been reached, when there began to steal upon the sight a row of little houses built of flint, further off a church, then again a pleasant little rectory-house. Houses broke the landscape, which had few trees, and was hilly only in the distance. It was a sort of town that seemed to have settled down to nothing and to seem nothing. It gave itself no airs; all was chaste and sober--of a Quaker-like trimness of aspect. In a small garden, distant by about a mile from the bulk of the town, stood a cottage of two stories, square and strong for the gales. It was Commander Conway's home, and the home of his daughter Ada. The girl went swiftly along the edge of the cliff, this time towards the right. She had come about a mile along the sands; she had now to retrace her steps on top. It was not very strange that she should know exactly where the man was imprisoned. She had lived many years in those parts, and knew most of the traditions of the smugglers, and had grown acquainted with their haunts, and had visited them, through talking with old sailors to whom times were always hard. How distant the rolling blue sea seemed all that way off! A full-rigged ship was then in sight, looking close in; she rolled in the noblest majesty the deep can clothe her toys with. But Ada had no eyes for pictures of the sea or sky, for processions of clouds, nor ear for the gull screeching in its soft white plenty midway high, nor for the breaker arching like glass to the sand. Not just then, anyhow. She struck a path, and walked with vigour about a mile, deviating into a part of the land, about a third of a mile from the brink of the cliff. She arrived at a strange old enclosure. It might have been some ancient smuggler's vault, the memorial gone, nothing but the flat tombstone and the square of broken neglected railings left. She squeezed through these broken railings, and approached the small flat stone, which was fitted with a ring in the middle; but this she had known for years. Not a living creature was in sight, not even a goat. That vast down of cliff swelled its rampart without visible figure of man to the distant hills. It seemed a desolate scene even now. One might figure it with some sense of horror in a gale of wind black with snow, so dark that if you did not mind, the next step might carry you into the scaling hiss that was washing, bubbling, fretting, trumpeting into breakers just below.