My old notion of screening the girl, if I could, seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour.

This state of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.
As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind.

I heard the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay.

A little further on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee of the sand hills.

Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one solitary black figure standing on it--the figure of Sergeant Cuff.
He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me.