“Don’t struggle!” he said.  “You’re all right.  You won’t fall.  Let go of that stuff and hang on to me!”

“I can’t!” she said.  “I can’t!”

“Let go of that stuff and hang on to me!” he said again, and the words were short and sharp.  “Left hand first!  Put your arm round my neck, and then get round and hang on with the other!  It’s only a few feet more.  I can manage it.”

They were the most definite instructions she had ever received in her life, and the most difficult to obey.  She hung, clinging with both hands, still vainly seeking a foothold, desperately afraid to relinquish her hold and trust herself unreservedly to his single-handed strength.  But, as he waited, it came to her that it was the only thing to do.  With a gasp she freed one hand at length and reaching back as he held her she thrust it over his shoulder.

“Now the other hand, please!” he said.

She did not know how she did it.  It was like loosing her grip upon life itself.  Yet after a few seconds of torturing irresolution she obeyed him, abandoning her last hold and hanging to him in palpitating apprehension.

He put forth his full strength then.  She felt the strain of his muscles as he gathered her up with one arm.  With the other hand, had she but known it, he was grasping only the naked rock.  Yet he moved as if absolutely sure of himself.  He drew a deep hard breath, and began to mount.

It was only a few feet to the top as he had said, but the climb seemed to her unending.  She was conscious throughout that his endurance was being put to the utmost test, and only by the most complete passivity could she help him.

But he never faltered, and finally—­just when she had begun to wonder if this awful nightmare of danger could ever cease—­she found herself set down upon the dewy grass that covered the top of the cliff.  The scent of the gorse bushes came again to her and the far sweet call of the nightingale.  And she realized that the danger was past and she was back once more in the magic region of her summer dreams from which she had been so rudely flung.  She saw again the shimmering, wonderful sea and the ever-brightening stars.  One of them hung, a golden globe of light like a beacon on the dim horizon.

Then Columbus came pushing and nuzzling against her, full of tender enquiries and congratulations; and something that she did not fully understand made her turn and clasp him closely with a sudden rush of tears.  The danger was over, all over.  And never till this moment had she realized how amazingly sweet was life.

CHAPTER IV

BROTHER DICK

She covered her emotion with the most herculean efforts at gaiety.  She laughed very shakily at the solicitude expressed by Columbus, and told him tremulously how absurd and ridiculous he was to make such a fuss about nothing.