The moon was shining brightly, and away in the north-east the faint pale light above the horizon told of the coming dawn. It was an exquisite summer night. The sea mist had gone inland to refresh the orchards and meadows of the rich valleys and uplands of fair Normandy and rocky Brittany. The long, quaint shadows of the grim boulders, and weird piles of granite, stretched across the white sand of the vast bay. Their rugged clefts and fantastic fissures, in black distinctness against the gleaming light which bathed their southern slope, lifting their hoary, weather-worn summits to the full brilliancy of the moon, and in turn throwing their twice borrowed light across the beach and prostrate forms of the sleeping men-at-arms. Away on the far edge of the bay the leaping flash of tumbling water told of the sea, whose tranquil depths seemed as far removed from that sleeping shore, and those towering piles of crumbling rock, as the fullness of summer from the barrenness of winter. The only living thing seemed to be the solitary man-at-arms as he rested on his long spear, his shadow stretching behind him in grotesque distortion--the man a pair of compasses, the lance a scaffolding pole. The distant crow of a cock, and the faint moan of the ceaseless sea grinding on the rocks far out in the bay were the only sounds that broke on the perfect stillness of that exquisite harmony in silver and grey. But Ralph gave scarce a thought to the poetry of the scene, he quietly clambered down on the shady side of the rocks, and stealthily creeping over the sand under shelter of the long shadows of the pile he had left, he was able to reach the farther side of the mass of rocks which had proved fatal to their escape, without the sentry seeing him. Pausing a moment to look round before he climbed up the steep and slippery boulders, on the apex of which the old boat was perched, some thirty feet or more above his head like a miniature Noah’s ark on the sunken top of another Ararat. Ralph’s attention was attracted by a white patch some ten or twelve yards away to his right. He looked at it attentively, and with a growing sense of dread. Drawn irresistibly towards it by a horrible fascination, Ralph found it was the face of Bowerman, ghastly and contorted, his body being wedged in between two huge rocks, where the sweep of the tide had washed it. Hastily leaving the place, the boy climbed up to the boat, and managed to get out the things he wanted without being observed. Armed with his sword and dagger, and protected by his helmet and body armour, he descended the rocks, edging carefully away from the livid face, which gazed out from the dark mass, and reached his former post of observation without incident.