Plain Morice Conyers grew by proportion—in his own estimation. A leader of men! Good that! A leader of men! And Jack Denningham to stand in the background and cry "Well done."
It was a pleasant reverie.
But the ghosts would rise again.
One stern of face, too, at last.
His father!
Twisted, crippled Ralph Conyers, the man who had been ready to give all for a lost cause. What would he say to his son now?
Ralph Conyers' son preferred not to think, remembering that boon companion of his, Steenie Berrington, whose name his father had cursed to his dying day.
The Breton guide had paused, panting, and stood with one lean, bared arm, pointing towards the coast. Over the horizon had gathered a pall too black to be mistaken for the shadows of approaching night—a sinister cloud where storm-furies brooded loweringly over a sinister land.
The shrill cries of the ospreys mingled with the weary sighing of waves which beat restlessly against the barren coast-line of white, angular rocks, tossing hither and thither in their rising anger the fetid shoals of rotting seaweed which bordered the narrow strip of shingle.
The storm was coming, not stealthily, with warning couriers of shadowed gloom, but swift as those vultures which winged their way across the low ridges of sand-dunes, where the golden heads of the sea-poppies lay low.