Miriam was already lighting her bedroom candle.

She bade the two men good night and went slowly upstairs.

As she reached her own room she heard the front door closed behind Loo and the rattle of the chain under the uncertain fingers of Septimus Marvin.

The sound of it was like the clink of that other chain by which Barebone had made fast his boat to the tottering post on the river-wall.
Miriam's room was at the front of the house, and its square Georgian windows faced eastward across the river to the narrow spit of marsh-land and the open sea beyond it.

A crescent of moon far gone on the wane, yellow and forlorn, was rising from the sea.