Then Deborah Shimmin, holding something in a fold of her nightdress with one hand, and climbing with the other, came up over the edge of the cliff a few yards away from us.
She looked very beautiful as she stepped up on the sloping sward above the haugh, with the pale moonlight just lighting her airy dress, and her face all sad and careworn.
Leaving Kermode to the care of the constable, Fred and I noiselessly followed the girl home, and saw her step over the obstacles in her path as by instinct, turning her face neither to the right nor left.
We decided to awaken her before she reached the door of the farmhouse, so that, according to the popular notion, she might never again become somnambulent.
With this view I stepped before her as she approached the door, but was astonished to find that she paused as if my presence blocked the way before she yet saw me or touched me. But there was no misunderstanding the blank stare in her wonderful eyes.
I gently put out my hand and took hers, as she put it out before her to feel the influence of a presence she could not see.
She did not scream or faint. She awoke with a start, and let the eggs fall on the ground.
At first she could not understand where she was, and just thought she was dreaming; but by degrees it came to her that she was standing before me in the pale moonlight when she thought she ought to be in bed.
Then I softly told her where she had been in her sleep, keeping back all knowledge of Kermode's attempted revenge on Andrew, and how we had decided to awake her. Then, with a little pleasant laugh, we both told her that the mystery of the seagulls' eggs was solved, and that neither Andrew nor she would be troubled again.
She fell to sobbing a little, and for the first time seemed to shiver with the cold; then she lifted the latch and we bade her good night.