They reached the cliff’s highest point, and looked down on Talland Bay.  By the side of the path, on a grass plateau, a stone war-cross reared grey against a blue sky, with its roll of names, and its comment—­“True love by life, true love by death is tried....”

The path, become narrower, rougher and more winding, plunged sharply, steeply downwards, running perilously along the cliff’s edge.  Nan got on her bicycle.

Barry called from the rear, “Nan!  It can’t be done!  It’s not rideable....  Don’t be absurd.”

Nan, remarking casually “It’ll be rideable if I ride it,” began to do so.

“Madwoman,” Barry said, and Kay assured him, “Nan’ll be all right.  No one else would, but she’s got nine lives, you know.”

Gerda came next behind Nan.  For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching Nan’s flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath, between the hill and the sea.  A false swerve, a failure to turn with the path, and one would fly off the cliff’s edge into space, fall down perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.

To refuse Nan’s lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before Barry.  “My word, Nan, you’re a sportsman!” Barry had said, coughing weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea.  That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed with Gerda.

She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.

“My God!” It was Barry’s voice again, from the rear.  “Stop, Gerda ... oh, you little fool.... Stop....”

But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried.  She was in full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.

Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in her mind as she rushed.

“True love by life, true love by death is tried....”

She took the first sharp turn, and the second.  The third, a right angle bending inward from the cliff’s very edge, she did not take.  She dashed on instead, straight into space, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of the morning through the blue air.

8

Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices crying out.  Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings.  She left her bicycle at the path’s side and turned and ran up.  Rounding a sharp bend, she saw them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.

The next turn of the path hid them from sight again.  But in two minutes she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.