At the date at which I reopen my story, Joel Rampick was a shambling, degraded, evil-looking man, half crazed between drink and his sense of injury; full of suppressed snarlings and mutterings; still, as of old, the watchful spirit of the ruins on the hill; still, as of old, policing Harry and me, though secretly rabid now in his impotency to control or terrify us; still, as of old, nevertheless, a hypocrite in form, while he carried his heart on his tattered sleeve. And so, as a main factor to be in the development of the strange drama, to the dark accomplishment of which in this year of our opening manhood I have been reluctantly leading, I reintroduce, and for the moment leave him. * * * * * * It was a wild, wet November, a season full of tempest and the promise of it, when guns would boom beyond the fatal sandbanks, and sudden rockets tear the sky; when the wives would gather a rich harvest of driftwood, coming down in the morning to a prospect of frenzied waters, and black spots of wreckage swooping in them like swallows blown about a storm. Near the end of the month the winds quieted, and one afternoon fell dead calm, so that Harry and I were moved to stroll out after dark to stretch our long unexercised limbs. It was so peaceful after the turmoil, that to enlarge our sense of convalescence, we took the way of the lonely valley, and climbed the Abbot’s Mitre. The moon was in its last quarter, and stooping towards its rest in the earth like a bent and wearied old soul; an idle drift or two of cloud pursued it, trying the effect of a star here and there on its gauze, as it loitered; and not a sound broke the stillness but the whispering chuckle of the small surf on the shingle below. We sat down on a block of stone in the midst of the huge and silent congress of ruin. Here were ghostly corridors, which the sea still mocked with an echo of monkish footsteps; pitch-black corners, where the faint rustle of mortar falling might have been the muttering whisper of the confessional; drifts of broken arches, colossal-shouldered, heaven-supporting in their time, now bowed under the weight of their hanging-gardens of ivy; shattered windows that were without a purpose, like open gates set up in a desert. Dim and tragic in the moonlight, they stood around us, a spectral deputation of giants, making its unearthly appeal for some human redress or sympathy. They seemed to hem us in, to throng closer and closer. An odd nightmare mood possessed me. I shivered, and stamped on the ground. “Harry,” I said, with a nervous giggle; “supposing these smuggler chaps down here ever _walk_!” With my very words he started, and nipped my arm like a vice. “Look!” he whispered thickly, and pointed. Out from the blackness of the overturned plinth hard by slipped a grey shadow, a thing that might have been a dog, but was not. “O!” I shuddered, falling against my friend. “Let’s get away--Harry! at the back here.”