Daniel uttered no pious aspiration. There are terrors too profound for words--periods of anguish in which a man cannot even pray. He followed Harold Jerningham out of the house, both men pale as death, and with an awful quiet fallen upon them. They went silently down to the little wooden jetty where the fishing boats were moored. The tide was at the flood, the rain driving against their pale, awe-stricken faces, the waters leaping and plunging against the timbers of the jetty. Nothing could be more hopeless than the outlook. The landlord of the inn was there. He had sent off a boat’s crew in search of the missing stranger. “How do we know that he has not returned by some other way?” asked Mr. Jerningham; while Daniel Mayfield stood, statue-like, staring seaward. The men pointed significantly to the perpendicular cliffs on each side of the jetty. The only cleft in these grim barriers, for miles along the coast, was that opening in which the little harbour and jetty had been made. Only by this way could the traveller have approached the village, and no traveller had come this way since the turning of the tide. This was the gist of what the men told Harold Jerningham, in cautious undertones, while Daniel Mayfield still stood, statue-like and unlistening, staring out at the roaring waste of waves. There the two men waited for upwards of an hour. The rain fell throughout that dreary interval. Mr. Jerningham paced slowly to and fro the little jetty. He could scarcely have recalled another occasion upon which he had exposed himself thus to the assaults of those persistent levellers the elements, but he was barely conscious of the rain that drifted in his face, and drenched his garments. The greatest mental shock that had ever befallen this man had come upon him to-day. A revelation the most startling had been made to him: and with that strange revealment bitter regret, vain remorse, had taken possession of his mind. He had borne himself with sufficient calmness in his interview with Daniel Mayfield, but the tempest within was not easily to be stilled. As he paced the jetty, he tried to reason with himself, to take a calm survey of the day’s events, but he tried in vain. All his thoughts travelled in a circle, and perpetually returned to the same point. “I have a son,” he said to himself; and then, with a sudden shudder, and a glance of horror towards the pitiless sea, he told himself, “I _had_ a son.” While he walked thus to and fro, oblivious alike of Daniel Mayfield and of the patient, lounging fishermen, Daniel came suddenly to him, and laid a strong hand upon his shoulder. “Where is my nephew?” he asked. “Where is my only sister’s only child? You saw him at Halko’s Head this morning, and parted from him there. Why did you let him return by the perilous route, while you travelled safely?”