Without hearing Pompey’s compromise with his cowardice and his conscience, Miss Seabright, torch in hand, walked up the gradually ascending rise of ground to the ruins of the old lodge. From being so long out in the night her eyes had become accustomed to it, so that now, under the brilliant starlight, the scene was distinctly, though darkly, before her—the ruin, the isle, and the sea. No sign of fence or outhouse could be seen as she approached the ruined lodge, whose skeleton walls stood up square around what seemed a deep, stagnant pond, whose stillness was drearily broken by the plunge of some toad, snake, or other loathsome reptile. Blinded or scared by the glare of the torch, bats flitted to and fro about the ruined walls, water rats ran in and out among the broken stones, and plunged into the stagnant waters, and lastly, a huge screech-owl took flight from the blasted tree by the fallen chimney, “making night hideous” with his yells. Profoundly saddened by seeing the beloved home of her wild childhood so desolate, Garnet turned silently away, and passing mournfully over the bleak ground, reached the strand. Then passing slowly all around the beach, she looked out upon the waters in search of any stray boat that might contain the supposed fugitive of the isle. As far as the eye could reach no sign of a boat could be seen. She then turned inland—if the tiny isle could be said to have an inland—and searched carefully about, walking around every specterlike tree standing far apart on the bare, bleak island, and quite incapable after all of concealing the smallest possible fugitive in the human shape. But she looked around and up into them, as I have seen men look under candlesticks and into tiny drawers for their missing hats, umbrellas, and boot-jacks! After her thorough search was quite over she turned to her attendant, and said: “Well, I am disappointed. There is positively no one here, and the mystery of the island light is still unsolved.” Her attendant did not answer. Thinking that he was still under the influence of fear, she said: “Why, Pompey, we are as safe and as quiet here as I was when I lived here with Aunt Joe and Hugh.”