"Well, come along! And when you get to the Battery, you'll have to stand still again, and wait until I report the coast clear. Commandant, will you give Miss Cara your arm, while I run ahead."
They stepped out together into the night. Vashti neither took the Commandant's arm nor spoke to him, even after Mr. Rogers had passed ahead out of earshot. Only when the pair had reached the dark battery, and were waiting there on the dark platform above the sea, she turned to him and asked—
"Shall you be busy to-morrow?"
"I am never busy."
"I have left my cloak and the guitar with Archelaus."
"I will bring them to Saaron to-morrow."
She turned away and leaned over the low parapet to the left. Some way below a footfall sounded, on the track leading to the watch-house—-the footfall of Beesley. A stone, dislodged by his tread, trickled and fell over the cliff into night.
"Curious!" remarked Mr. Rogers, confidentially, to the Commandant, twenty minutes later, as they stood and peered into the darkness after Vashti's boat. "Here I am, stuck on these Islands (so to speak) with a telescope held to my eye. Of the folk upon 'em I see next to nothing. Now, I don't know if you took note of it, but that's a remarkable looking woman; a remarkably handsome woman; and I've spent these years here without guessing that such a woman existed hereabouts. Eh?" Mr. Rogers relapsed into mild facetiousness. "If you were a younger man, Commandant, I could hatch up a pretty story out of to-night's doings—and if I didn't mind a laugh against myself."