A few nights later, after supper, he strolled up Beau-nez under a harvest-moon spreading silvery wings moth-like over earth and sea. He was full of his own thoughts, and and for once heavy, almost down-hearted, as he took up his familiar post of vigil beside the flagstaff on the Head and looked out over the shining waters. The Liberals were moving at last, it seemed. The great cry for Dreadnoughts, more Dreadnoughts, _We want eight! We won't wait!_ had gone up to the ears of Government from millions of middle-class homes; but the Working Man still slept. Would nothing rouse him to the Terror that stalked by night across those quiet waters? ... The Working Man, who would have to bear the brunt of it when the trouble came.... The Working Man...? The Head was deserted save for the familiar goat tethered outside the coast-guard station. The moon beamed down benignantly on the silver-sabled land, broad-bosomed about him, and the waters stirring far beneath him with a rustle like wind in corn. Then he heard a movement at his back, and turned to see behind him, shabby, collarless, sheepish, the very Working Man of whom he had been thinking. The Colonel regarded the mystic figure, gigantic in the moonlight, a type rather than an individual, with an interest that was half compassionate and half satirical. _Yes. That was the feller! That was the chap who would take it in the neck! That man with the silly smile--God help him!_ "_Come to look for it?_" he said to the shadow, half to himself--"_wiser than your kind?_" "_Look for what, sir?_" "_The Creeping Death that's stealing across the sea to swallow you and yours._" The shadow sidled towards him. "Is that you, sir?" a voice said. "I thought it were." The Colonel emerged from his dream. "What, Caspar!" he replied. "What are you doing up here at this time of night?" "Just come up for a look round before turning in, me and my wife, sir," the other answered. "Ruth," he called, "it's the Colonel." A young woman with an orange scarf about her hair issued from the shadow of the coast-guard station and came forward slowly. "I've heard a lot about you from Ern, sir," she said in a deep voice that hummed like a top in the silvery silence. "When you commanded his battalion in India and all." The Colonel, standing in the dusk, listened with a deep content as to familiar music, the player unseen; and was aware that his senses were stirred by a beauty felt rather than seen...... Then he dropped down the hill to the hostel twinkling solitary in the coombe beneath. "Your friend Caspar's married," he told his wife on joining her in the loggia. The little lady scoffed. "Married!" she cried. "He's been married nearly a year. They spent their honeymoon on the hill at the back last autumn. I could see them from my room." "Why ever didn't you tell me?" asked the Colonel. "I'd have run em in for vagrancy." "No, you wouldn't," answered Mrs. Lewknor. "Why not?"