Clouds must have come up from the south while Dikon climbed the hill, for the sky was now filled with them, sweeping majestically to the northeast. A vague sighing told him that a night wind had arisen and presently his hair lifted from his forehead. He had brought his torch but he was unwilling to disclose himself. He had told nobody of his intention to climb high up the hill. He saw that in a minute or two the moon would reappear and he waited, peering into darkness, for the moment when Mr Falls would be revealed.

It was not long, perhaps no more than a minute, before the return of the moonlight. After its brief eclipse the strange landscape seemed to be more sharply defined; mounds, craters, pools and mud pots all showed clearly. He could even see the white flags along the path. But Mr Falls had completely disappeared.

IV

‘Really,’ Dikon thought, ‘if I go all jitter-bug after the problematical death of a man who was almost certainly an enemy agent, I’m not likely to be a howling success in the blitz. No doubt Mr Falls is pottering about in the shadows. In a moment he will reappear.’

He waited and watched. He could hear his watch tick. Away to the east a night bird cried out twice. He saw a light moving about in the village and wondered if it was Colonel Claire’s. Two or three more sprang up. They were searching about the village. Once, far below on the other side of the hill, he heard Simon and Smith call to each other. An interval in the vast procession of clouds left the face of the moon quite clear. But still Mr Falls remained invisible.

‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ Dikon thought. He had taken three strides downhill when a brilliant point of light flashed on the mound above Taupo-tapu and was gone, but not before the image of a stooping man had darted up in Dikon’s brain. The flash was not repeated but in a little while the faintest possible glow of reflected light appeared behind the mound. ‘Why, damn and blast the fellow,’ thought Dikon, ‘he’s messing about on forbidden territory!’

His only emotion was that of fury; his impulse, to plunge downhill, cross the path and catch Falls red-handed. He had actually set out to do this when a shattering fall taught him that he could not run downhill and at the same time keep his eye on a distant spot on the landscape. When he had picked himself up and recovered his torch, which had rolled downhill, he heard a thin sweet whistle threading its way through an air that transported Dikon with astounding vividness into the wings of a London theatre.

‘Come away, come away, Death, I am slain by a fair cruel maid.’

Mr Septimus Falls was walking briskly back along the path, whistling his way home.