The bitter darkness was a fierce enemy to the old man, but not even it could daunt his curiosity. With many groans he swiftly grappled with his breeches, dragged on his vest and doublet, and wriggled his cold toes into hose and leather. The night bit him keenly, but he was determined that this woman should not be allowed to pass out of his house, in the dead of the night, with impunity. The landlord was sure she could not be going forth thus with an innocent intention. And in any case, his curiosity apart, he was the last man in the world to neglect a chance of obtaining a weapon against her. In the midst of these brief speculations he found himself downstairs in the kitchen, protecting an unsteady candle with his hand. A sudden rush of air extinguished it. He was left entirely in the dark, with no precise knowledge of his bearings. He struck a course, however, for the kitchen door, and found it, as he expected, open wide. On entering the night, his face and hands were stung with the icy kisses of the falling sleet; little waves of it were running down the wind; the sea was crying with loud and many voices; and the hour seemed perishingly desolate and cold. The landlord peered up the path leading to the shore, and saw, many yards away, with the starlight playing round it, a wind-blown figure, whose bent head and flapping cloak were fighting hard against the blast. It was a woman struggling to the sands, and the thing that made her form the more conspicuous was a lantern that she bore. It picked her out in a prominence of light, and made a mark of her for the landlord’s eyes. Crossing the road, the innkeeper came within the shadows of the rocks. Crouching in them, he dogged her step by step to the open sea. She was not long upon her road. She strode forth through the very teeth of the gale, straightly and confidently, either as one well-broken to adventure with no mind to shrink from this, or, as the landlord more shrewdly preferred to think, as one by nature timid--himself, for example--who, being involved in a course of a highly daunting character, was compelled to act in a manner of frenzied eagerness, or not at all. The landlord, panting after her in stealth, found his breath quite insufficient for the wicked wind, and, too, his head became the prey of neuralgic pains. He had never been so nearly a hero in his life as his curiosity, his cunning, and rapacity made him now. Presently a sheer and narrow cleft appeared between the rocks. The woman walked along, and a minute afterwards her gaze was strained upon the sea. She approached to the extreme verge of the waters, so that her feet were wetted with the tide. She held her hand across her brows to shield them against the darkness and the driving sleet; and that her eyes might cleave the boiling waste before her.