There came a sudden sharp chuckle into the night. Something was congratulating itself with glee that it had put water-boots with india-rubber soles upon its feet; noiseless soles that would make no sound upon the gravelled ways about the familiar house that had belonged to Admiral Custance. . . . Lothian lifted the latch of the gate which led to the short gravel-drive of the "Haven" with delicate fingers. An expert handles a blown bird's-egg so. It rose. It fell. Not a crack came from the slowly-pushed gate which fell back into its place with no noise, leaving the night-comer inside. The gables of the house rose black and stark against the sky. The attic-windows where old dame Hannett and her daughter slept were black. They were fast in sleep now. The night-intruder set his gun carefully against the stone pillar of the gate. Then he tripped over the pneumatic lawns before the house with almost a dance in his step. He frisked over the lawns, avoiding the chocolate patches that meant flower-beds, with complacent skill. Just then no clouds obscured the moon, which rode high before the advancing figure. A fantastic shadow followed Lothian, coquetting with the flower beds, popping this way and that, but ever at his heels. It threw itself about in swimming areas of grey vagueness and then concentrated itself into a black patch with moving outlines. There was an ecstasy about this dancing shadow. And now, the big building which had been a barn and which Admiral Custance had re-built and put to various uses, cut wedge-like into the lit sky. The Shadow crept close to the Dream Figure and crouched at its heels. It seemed to be spurring that figure on, to be whispering in its ear. . . . We know all about the Dream Figure. Through the long pages of this chronicle we have learned how, and of what, It has been born. And were it not that experts of the Middle Age--when Demonology was a properly recognised science--have stated that a devil has never a shadow, we should doubtless have been sure that it was our old friend, the Fiend Alcohol, that contracted and expanded with such fantastic measures over the moon-lit grass. Lothian knew his way well about this domain. Admiral Custance had been his good friend. Often in the old sailor's house, or in Lothian's, the two had tippled together and drank toasts to the supremacy which Queen Britannia has over the salt seas. The lower floor of the barn had been used as a box-room for trunks and a general store-house, though the central floor-space was made into a court for Badminton; when nephews and nieces, small spars of Main and Mizzen and the co-lateral Yardarms, came to play upon a retired quarter-deck. The upper floor had ever been sacred to the Admiral and his hobbies.