The sunlight was beginning to slant through the ravine, and here and there the racing water gleamed silvery.  It was intensely refreshing to kneel and bathe face and hands in its icy coldness.  She lingered long over it.  Its sparkling purity seemed to reach and still the throbbing misery at her heart.  In some fashion it brought her peace.

She would have prayed, but she felt she had no prayer to offer.  She had no favour to ask for herself, and her world was quite empty now.  She had no one in her heart for whom to pray.

Yet for awhile she knelt dumb among the lifeless stones, her face hidden, her thoughts with the father whose loss she had scarcely begun to realise.  It might be that God would understand and pity her silence, she thought drearily to herself.

The rush of the water drowned all sound but its own, and the memory of Nick, waiting above, faded from her consciousness like a dream.  Her brain felt numb and heavy still.  She did not want to think.  She leaned her head against a rock, closing her eyes.  The continuous babble of the stream was like a lullaby.

Under its soothing influence she might have slept, a blessed drowsiness was stealing over her, when suddenly there flashed through her being a swift warning of approaching danger.  Whence it came she knew not, but its urgency was such that instinctively she started up and looked about her.

The next instant, with a sound half-gasp, half-cry, she was on her feet, and shrinking back against her sheltering boulder in the paralysis of a great horror.  There, within a few yards of her and drawing nearer, ever nearer, with a beast-like stealth, was a tall, black-bearded tribesman.  Transfixed by terror, she stood and gazed at him, waiting dumbly, cold from head to foot, feeling as though her very heart had turned to stone.

Nearer he came, and yet nearer, soundlessly over the stones.  His eyes, gleaming, devilish, were to her as the eyes of a devouring monster.  In her agony she tried to shriek aloud, but her voice was gone, her throat seemed locked.  She was powerless.

Close to her, for a single instant he paused; then, as in a lightning flash, she saw the narrow, sinewy hand and snake-like arm dart forward to seize her, felt every muscle in her body stiffen to rigidity in anticipation of its touch, and shrank—­shrank in every nerve though she made no outward sign of shrinking.

But on the instant, with a panther-like spring, sure, noiseless, deadly, another figure leapt suddenly across her vision.  There followed a violent struggle in front of her, a confused swaying to and fro, a cry choked instantly and terribly, the tinkling sound of steel falling upon stone.  And then both figures were on the ground almost at her feet, locked together in mortal combat, fighting, fighting like demons in a silence that throbbed with the tumult of unrestrained savagery.

Later she never could remember how long it took her to realise that the second apparition was Nick, or if she had known it from the first.  She felt herself hovering upon the brink of a great emptiness, a void immense, and yet all her senses were alive and tingling with horror.  With agonised perception of what was passing, she yet felt numbed:  as though her body were dead, but still contained a vital, tortured soul.