DESOLATION

Out of a deep abyss of darkness in which she seemed to have wandered ceaselessly and comfortlessly for many days, Muriel Roscoe came haltingly back to the surface of things.  She was very weak, so weak that to open her eyes was an exertion requiring all her resolution, and to keep them open during those first hours of returning life a physical impossibility.  She knew that she was not alone, for gentle hands ministered to her, and she was constantly aware of some one who watched her tirelessly, with never-failing attention.  But she felt not the smallest interest regarding this faithful companion, being too weary to care whether she lived or fell away for ever down those unending steeps up which some unseen influence seemed magnetically to draw her.

It was a stage of returning consciousness that seemed to last even longer than the period of her wandering, but this also began to pass at length.  The light grew stronger all about her, the mists rolled slowly away from her clogged brain, leaving only a drowsing languor that was infinitely restful to her tired senses.

And then while she lay half-dreaming and wholly content, a remorseless hand began to bathe her face and head with ice-cold water.  She awoke reluctantly, even resentfully.

“Don’t!” she entreated like a child.  “I am so tired.  Let me sleep.”

“My poor dear, I know all about it,” a motherly voice made answer.  “But it’s time for you to wake.”

She did not grasp the words—­only, very vaguely, their meaning; and this she made a determined, but quite fruitless, effort to defy.  In the end, being roused in spite of herself, she opened her eyes and gazed upwards.

And all his life long Nick Ratcliffe remembered the reproach that those eyes held for him.  It was as if he had laid violent hands upon a spirit that yearned towards freedom, and had dragged it back into the sordid captivity from which it had so nearly escaped.

But it was only for a moment that she looked at him so.  The reproach faded swiftly from the dark eyes and he saw a startled horror dawn behind it.

Suddenly she raised herself with a faint cry.  “Where am I?” she gasped.  “What—­what have you done with me?”

She stared around her wildly, with unreasoning, nightmare terror.  She was lying on a bed of fern in a narrow, dark ravine.  The place was full of shadow, though far overhead she saw the light of day.  At one end, only a few yards from her, a stream rushed and gurgled among great boulders, and its insistent murmur filled the air.  Behind her rose a great wall of grey rock, clothed here and there with some dark growth.  Its rugged face was dented with hollows that looked like the homes of wild animals.  There was a constant trickle of water on all sides, an eerie whispering, remote but incessant.  As she sat there in growing panic, a great bat-like creature, immense and shadowy, swooped soundlessly by her.