The descent seemed interminable.  His flesh ached, his sinews creaked, his senses reeled with the pain, the mind-agony, the horror of it all.

At last he caught a glimmer of the wet sand, less than ten feet below.  He had just landed on a bit of white tableland wantonly carved in the naked cliff.  The rough gradients which up to now had guided him in his descent ceased abruptly.  Behind him the cliff rose upwards, in front and, to his right, and left a concave wall, straight down to the beach.

Exhausted and half-paralyzed, de Chavasse perforce had to throw himself down these last ten feet, hardly pausing to think whether his head would or would not come in violent contact with one of the chalk boulders which stand out here and there in the flat sandy beach.

He threw down the lantern first, which was extinguished as it fell.  Then he took the final jump, and soon lay half-unconscious, numbed and aching in every limb in the wet sand.

Anon he tried to move.  His limbs were painful, his shoulders ached, and he had some difficulty in struggling to his feet.  An unusually large boulder close by afforded a resting place.  He reached it and sat down.  His head was still swimming but his limbs were apparently sound.  He sat quietly for a while, recouping his strength, gathering his wandering senses.  The lantern lay close to his feet, extinguished but not broken.

He groped for his tinder-box, and having found it, proceeded to relight the tiny tallow dip.  It was a difficult proceeding for the tinder was damp, and the breeze, though very slight in this hollow portion of the cliffs, nevertheless was an enemy to a trembling little flame.

But Sir Marmaduke noted with satisfaction that his nerves were already under his control.  He succeeded in relighting the lantern, which he could not have done if his hands had been as unsteady as they were awhile ago.

He rose once more to his feet, stamped them against the boulders, stretched out his arms, giving his elbows and shoulders full play.  Mayhap he had spent a quarter of an hour thus resting since that final jump, mayhap it had been an hour or two; he could not say for time had ceased to be.

But the mist had penetrated to his very bones and he did not remember ever having felt quite so cold.

Now he seized his lantern and began his search, trying to ascertain the exact position of the portion of the cliff’s edge where he and Lambert the smith had been standing a while ago.

It was not a difficult matter, nor was the search a long one.  Soon he saw a huddled mass lying in the sand.

He went up to it and placed the lantern down upon a boulder.

Horror had entirely left him.  The crisis of terror at his own fell deed had been terrible but brief.  His was not a nature to shrink from unpleasant sights, nor at such times do men have cause to recoil from contact with the dead.