From far below, echoed the cold crash of breakers on the rocks. Far above, torn battalions of cloud swirled witlessly across a shuddering moon. Along the cliff, white splashes that marked by day the coastguard’s path, now came and went like evil staring faces....
Stuart swung on, unfaltering; Peter followed as best she might. Once she stumbled. He stopped, and flung a guiding arm about her.
“I can walk alone,” said Peter.
“I know you can....” The tempest hurled his voice straight past her, and across the black stretch of moor. “And it’s because you can walk alone, that you’re going to walk with me now.”
They pressed forward, eluding carefully what they thought was bog-land, only to discover on looking back, that they had been tricked by shadows. And shadows, again, resolved themselves into marsh-patches, yielding and treacherous. A fine rain sprayed their coats to a glitter. The moon had been beaten from her fields, leaving the world in a roar of darkness.... Once they halted abruptly on the verge of nothing, where the land had been eaten away. Once they followed the cliff that ran out sheer to a point, crested by dark shapes of granite, monsters thrown up æons ago by the waves.
Peter and Stuart stood motionless for several moments, rigid bodies thrusting at the wall of wind, that blew with never a drop nor yet a swell in the strength and sound of it; stripped from them all memory of a narrower stuffier world.
—“Tired?”
“Of the wind?”
“Of me, then?”
“I’ve never yet met the man who could tire me.”