Excerpt from Rachel Marr

Beyond the twin headlands that made Morna into a little fishing harbour, and sheltered its narrow strip of sand, the round moon hung clouded in the midnight sky. The shadows of the carved headlands were obscured by a tender mist of dissipated light; the sea was shadow to the shore, while on the horizon, where the moon shone clearer, a silver line accentuated the lucid darkness of the nearer waters of the land. In that silver showed the lofty canvas of a ship drifting 'eastward on the flood which inshore now began to slacken. The waters lapped less insistently upon the rocks; the silence of the night deepened sensibly; the whispers of the salt marsh, through which a slow stream found its way to the sea, grew fainter still; the eternal music of the pinewood above the little marsh ran off into the very ghost of a vibrant and musical murmur among its loftiest branches. It was midnight, full moon and full fiood, -and the warm world rested.

The house's of the little village, which could hardly be seen from the cove, since most lay behind a barrier of rock, the shoreward buttress of the eastern headland, were all asleep. Some of its few men were far out at sea long - line fishing in the great sweep of the tides. They would not return till the morning when they came from the eastward on the ebb and met the young flood and the breeze it brought with it from the west. A few boats lay upon the higher sands and shingle: one was moored beyond low-water mark, where it rested as quietly as any rock. For two long hours Morna had been still.

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