The boy slid down the ladder into the gloom of the kitchen.

There was no familiar silver head at its wonted place of watch by the loop-hole.

"Piper!"

"Sir!"

The old foretop-man was sitting beside the trapdoor, peering down into the blackness of the cellar, and listening intently.

"That you, Master Kit? Would you step this way, sir? There keeps on a kind of a rumbling like in the drain—a'most as though the gentlemen be running a cargo. I ca'ant justly make it out."

The boy came to his side and listened. True, there was a muffled noise of rolling in the drain, and dull banging against the door. Well, they might bang till they were blue: they would make as much impression on that door as the breeze on Beachy Head.

The old man looked up and saw the lad beside him in shirt-sleeves.

"Hullo, sir! what's forrad then?"

"I'm going to take a little trot over to the shingle-bank to have a look round," said the boy, shivering. "I want you to stand by the door to let me out and in."

The old man rolled up his sleeves, snatched his cutlass from the corner, whetted it with the easy grace of a bird whetting its beak, and spat on his hands.

"Then it's stand by to repel boarders! Rithe away, sir, when you are."

The Parson peered down.

"All's quiet," he whispered. "Ready, Kit?"

"Yes, sir."

The boy stood up pale in the gloom.

"Then ease those bolts away. Gently, Piper!"

The old man opened quietly.

A sweet wind stole in, and with it a flood of light.

Kit peeped out.

How naked it looked, how terrible!

"One moment."

He bent, untied his shoe-lace, and tied it up again.

Upstairs it had seemed such an easy thing to dare this deed, so full of the poetry and romance of war. Down here, face to face with the bare fact, it was a different matter. A plank, as it were, had been thrust out from solid earth over Eternity; it was his to walk that plank; and he didn't like the job.

Piper held the door, waiting respectfully. The old man's sleeves were rolled to the arm-pit. On one hairy fore-arm a dancing-girl was tattooed, record of the days, now forty years since, before, in his own simple phrase, he had larned Christ.

He knew no fear himself: for he knew that he was impregnable. But his heart went out to this slip of a lad, who had to face Eternity alone, and found it terrible.

The twilight of love, always in all faces the same, which comes when at a call the Christ rises from the deeps of the heart, darkened his eyes.

He gave a shy little cough.

"There's one bower-anchor'll weather any storm, by your leave, sir," he said, the sailor and the Christian quaintly commingled.

The boy felt the other's strength flow into his.

"I know," he panted, and plunged.