besides. He had no least notion of what distance he might have
travelled or whether he had walked in a straight line or a circle; but
when he thought to glance over his shoulder--there was at the moment
perhaps more wind with less snow than there had been for some time--he
found the lighthouse watching him as it had from the first: as if he
had not won a step away from it for all his struggle and his pains. The
white, staring eye winked sardonically through a mist of flakes, was
blotted out and turned up a baleful red. It seemed to mock him, but
Amber nodded at it with no unfriendly feeling. It still might serve his
purpose very well, if his strength held, since he had merely to keep
his back to the light and the ocean beach upon his right to win to the
Shampton sandbar, whether soon or late.

Inflexible of purpose in the face of all his weariness and
discouragement, he was on the point of resuming his march when he was
struck by the circumstance that the whitened shoulder of a dune, quite
near at hand, should seem as if frosted with light--coldly luminous.

Staring, speculative, he hung in the wind--inquisitive as a cat but
loath to waste time in footless inquiry. The snow-fall, setting in with
augmented violence, decided him. Where light was, there should be man,
and where man, shelter.

His third eager stride opened up a wide basin in the dunes, filled with
eddying veils of snow, and set, at some distance, with two brilliant
squares of light--windows in an invisible dwelling. In the space
between them, doubtless, there would be a door. But a second time he
paused, remembering that the island was said to be uninhabited. Only
yesterday he had asked and been so informed.... Odd!