"Well! We stood there, and to ease the pressure of the moment she put up the binoculars and swept the little beach, finally coming to rest at the big house--Grünbaum's house. While we had been talking a light had come out on the balcony, and figures began to move about with the precise and enigmatic motions of marionettes. Without glasses I could see Grünbaum seated at a table with a big lamp over his head. Another figure moved to the open side and stood still. I was wondering what this portended when Grünbaum half rose and waved his arms, and the other figure turned and dwindled rapidly into obscurity, suddenly coming into the light again at the other side of the table. And Artemisia said quietly, 'There's father!' and handed me the binoculars. "To say that I was interested would not put the matter in its true light. I was more than that. There was a fantastic quality in the whole business which was almost supernatural. It is strange enough to meet a person after many years; stranger still to meet one who has made a powerful yet unsympathetic impression upon you--to meet him with all your old dislikes and prejudices washed to a clear and colourless curiosity. But to see such a man as I saw Captain Macedoine, afar off, through an atmosphere charged with the electric blue radiance of moonlight, moving in an alien orbit, animated by unknown emotions--why, it was like seeing a man who was dead and gone to another world! I raised the glasses and focussed them. Captain Macedoine stood leaning heavily on his hands as they grasped the edge of the table, and he was staring straight out at me. Of course he could see nothing beyond the balcony, but the impression was exactly that of a man striving to win back across the gulf to his former existence. And his strained immobility was accentuated by the figure of Grünbaum with his jerkily moving arms, his polished forehead gleaming in the lamplight, the gyrations of his chin as he turned every moment or so and looked up sideways at the other. Grünbaum flourished papers, reaching out and rearranging them, throwing himself back in his chair and beating the table with a folded document to emphasize his words. And every now and again the whole scene grew dim as though it were a phantasmagoria, and about to dissolve, when the smoke from Grünbaum's cigar floated and hung in the still air.