For a step or two only. She stamped her heels on his feet. She struggled to release her arms from the clamp about her waist She exerted all her strength to drag him with her over the edge. Bony could see her frenzied face, and just discern the stony grimness on the face of the man.

Abruptly the man released her, caught her jacket with his left hand, swung her back from the cliff’s edge, and neatly upper-cut her. As she collapsed, he caught her again in his arms and carried her back from Bony’s sight.

“Ungentlemanly, but necessary,” Bony thought, and decided to make sure all had ended well.

There was no way round the eastern claw of Split Point, and no way up to the Lighthouse save by walking the beach for several hundred yards the other way, crossing the bar of the Inlet and negotiating the rocks which had fallen from the cliffs. As he proceeded into the Inlet, the back of the headland came down to meet the level ground, and from this point he could take the long slope to the Lighthouse.

The slope took Bony high above the great basin with its sandbar raised by the sea to keep the creek water within. He passed by two graves of the original pioneers of this district, on and up to skirt the eight-feet-high iron fence about the Lighthouse. To his left were the houses once occupied by the keepers: to his right, low clumps of tea-tree bush scattered upon the grassland to the verge of the cliffs.

The wind hissed about the corners of the iron fence: the white towering structure ignored it. On passing into the clear beyond the fence, Bony saw no one. He proceeded to the place where the girl had appeared, and, keeping safely back from the cliff, was undecided what next to do. Below was the narrow strip of sand-beach whereon, written plain, were his own tracks and the mark of the shallow grave he had dug with his heels. Here on the verge were the tracks of the girl’s shoe heels.