She completed the "sugary" paragraph that brought her instalment to the requided "curtain," wrote "_To be continued_" beneath it, and smoothed the blotting-paper down over the pad with a sigh of relief. "There!" She rose, stretching the tall symmetry of herself under the Persian robe, then glanced with raised eye-brows at her watch. So late? She had not realized the flight of the midnight hours. Everybody else in the hotel would be asleep. Mrs. Cartwright snapped off the lights. Guided by a thin streak of moonlight on the floor, she stepped to the window, flung first the shutters then the windows open, and stepped out, all shimmering and ghostly, on to her balcony. She stood--accustomed to air about her--looking out on the moon-bathed scene below. The _Baissin_ was a sheet of silver; the belt of sandhills silver-grey. No words can give the whiteness of the Biscay rollers, silent with distance, tossing their columns of foam to the vast and lambent sky. Stars were as pin-points. Reassuringly near, the lighthouse raised its taper finger, on which the light sparkled like a jewel, now white, now red. Mrs. Cartwright, enjoying all this too much to feel cold, stood watching. Why did people sleep away the best part of the twenty-four hours? Why scuttle away and hide from Beauty within the ugliness of their own houses? It was only once in months that a woman stood as she was standing at that virgin hour, able to lose herself in the solitude, the freshness and silence and light. She stood, dematerialized, part no longer of a woman's warm and pulsing body, but of the sea and sky themselves.... White, red.... White, red ... the phare light flashed almost in time to the soft breathing, that could be heard, in that perfect stillness of her body. _She_ was outside it.... _Ah!_ What was that? With a start so violent that it seemed to wrench her, Mrs. Cartwright came to herself again, and to--what Horror was this? Through that perfect stillness a cry had rung out, sudden as a shot. Close beside her; it came from the right. It was a man's voice crying hoarsely, "_Got_ him!" Then another cry, of agony; a scream.... What was it? CHAPTER VI THE CLUTCHING OF THE CHARM "Fights all his battles o'er again; And thrice he charged the foe, and thrice he slew the slain." Dryden. "Un aviateur, un de ces demi-dieux dont l'existence sur terre doit être courte. (La lumière dont ils procèdent les rappelle bientôt. On croit qu'ils tombent, mais ils remontent.)" Marcel Astruc. It came from the right, therefore it must be in the bedroom next to hers on the wall encircled by the balcony.