Still this grim moon and the few sardonic stars that revealed the woman’s face and form so clearly, mocked the groping blind-eyed rogue who, lying in a new concealment, strove to profit by their aid. They showed him all, yet showed him nothing. He could see her precariously poised under the awful sky, confronting the more awful sea. He could see the very flesh of her quiver in the wind; he could hear her garments flapping in the blast; and as once she raised her lantern a fortunate angle to the moon, he saw the pale tears shine upon her cheeks. All this: yet how much did he know! To the sensual landlord it was symbolical of nothing; of nothing beyond the elements lurking in his own base intelligence. To him the woman was indubitably mad or drunk or criminal. He clenched his frozen hands upon the thought. Body of God! she should be made to pay a price for exposing his sacred person to the night and the tempest in this manner. He would have his two clotted hands upon her. He would tear every jewel, every rag off her mad body; he would tear out the very heart of her for this; and then she and that precious husband of hers should be delivered over to the gibbet; and they should swing in the wind o’ nights such as these, forever. There was unction in these thoughts to the bruised and beaten landlord, now spying full-length upon his belly behind a boulder. But either these ideas or a particular phrase recalled Diggory Fargus to his mind. How he loathed the image of that mariner! Could it be possible that this woman was searching for him? Indeed, what more likely? He doubtless had some wretched smuggler lying in some little cove on the beach; lying in readiness to take fugitive cavaliers by night into France. Could it be that she was waving that lantern as a signal to Diggory Fargus? Already the landlord’s mind was at work on that new phase of the night’s mystery; already, despite the extreme bodily discomfort in which he was, he fell to tracing its bearing on his own private interests, as was his invariable wont, under every conceivable condition. His mind did not follow that trend very long, however. For while the woman stood with the moon and the stars, the wind and the spray beating upon her, a second figure sprang silently and mysteriously out of the night. It appeared so suddenly upon the platform of rock on which the woman stood at gaze, that the astonished landlord could not tell how it had come there. It had evidently climbed up from the other side, however, and, strangely enough, the woman seemed neither to be aware of its apparition nor to expect it; for even when the figure was less than ten yards behind her, her back was towards it, and she still looked out to the sea.