The clouds came across the sky, blotting out one by one the glistening stars; a chilly mist swept along the valley from the sea, and all around was dark and cold as the future of his blasted life. For the minutes glided into hours, and she came not--came not to say one gentle, loving word--one God-speed to send him on his way; and at last, heart-broken, he staggered to the great floral gate, held the chilly rails, kissed the iron, and gazed with passionate longing up at the now darkened house, and then walked slowly away, stunned by the violence of his grief. The wind was rising fast, and coming in heavy soughs from off the sea. As he reached the lodge gates at Penreife he paused, staring before him in a helpless way, till a heavy squall smote him, and with it a sharp shower of rain, whose drops seemed to cool his forehead and rouse him to action. Starting off, with great strides, he took the short cut, and made for the sea, where the fields ended suddenly, their short, thyme-scented grass seeming to have been cut where there was a fall of full four hundred feet, down past a rugged, piled-up wall of granite, to the white-veined rock, polished by the restless sea below. To any one unaccustomed to the coast a walk there on a dark night meant death, either by mutilation on the cruel rocks, always seeming to be studded with great gouts of crimson blood, where the sea anemones clung in hundreds, or else by drowning in the deep, clear water, when the tide was up, and the waves played amidst the long, chocolate strands of fucus and bladder-wrack, waving to and fro. It was going to be a wild night, but it seemed in keeping with the chaos of his mind. Far out on the sea, softly rising to and fro in the thick darkness, were the lights of the fishing-boats, as a score or so lay drifting with their herring-nets; and in his heart there was not a rough fisher there whose lot he did not envy. "And she could not come!" he groaned, as he stood there, with bare head. "Oh, my love--my love! To go without one gentle word, far, far away, and but yesterday so happy!" The wind increased in force, and, with the gathering strength of the tide, the waves came rushing in, to beat in thunder against the rocks far beneath his feet; and then, with a rush, the fine salt spray was whirled up, and swept in his face, as he gazed straight out to sea. At another time he might have shuddered, standing thus upon the edge of that great cliff, with--just dimly seen in its more intense blackness-- the rugged headland that stretched like a buttress into the sea upon his left. But now the horrors of the place seemed welcome, and he felt, as a smile came on his dripping features, that it would be pleasant to leap from where he stood right off at once into oblivion. It seemed so easy, such a quiet way of getting rest from the turmoil and trouble of the future, that the feeling seemed to grow upon him.