A hundred yards below the rock, tucked out of sight of the man at the flag-pole, stretched a ledge-like strip of level ground, backed by the thick tangle of growth which masked the slope.  Beyond its edge of roughly blocked and crevassed stone, the gorge fell away a dizzy thousand feet.  Out of the pines struggled the half-overgrown path where once a road had led from the castle.  This way the earlier Lords of Galavia had come to look across the backbone of the peninsula, to the east.

As Benton paced the ledge impatiently, awaiting the outcome of Blanco’s reconnoiter, he noticed with a nauseating sense of onrushing peril how the purpled shadows of the mountains were lengthening across the valley and beginning to creep up the other side.

Each time his pacing brought him to the edge of the clearing he paused to look down at the sullen walls of Karyl’s castle.

A woman, flushed and breathless from the climb, pushed through the scrub pines at the path’s end and stopped suddenly at the marge of the clearing.  Her slender girlish figure, clad in corduroy skirt and blue jersey, was poised with lance-like straightness, and a grace as free as a boy’s.  Her hands, cased in battered gauntlets, went suddenly to her breast, as though she would muffle the palpitant heart beneath the jersey.  She stood for a moment looking at the man and the ultramarine of her eyes clouded slowly into gray.  The pink flush of exercise died instantly to pallor in her cheeks.

Then the lips overcame an impulse to quiver and spoke slowly in an undertone and with marked effort.  “This is twice that I have seen you,” she whispered, “although you are three thousand miles away.”

The man wheeled, not suddenly, but heavily and slowly.  “I am real,” he answered simply.

Cara put out one hand like a sleep-walker, and came forward, still incredulous.

“Cara, dearest one!” he said impetuously.  “You must have known that I would be near you—­that I would be standing by, even though I couldn’t help!”

She shook her head.  “I have been having these hallucinations, you know, of late.”  She explained as though to herself.  “I guess it’s—­it’s just missing people so that does it.”

She was close to him now, close, too, to the sheer drop of the cliff, walking forward with eyes wide and fixed on his face.  He took a quick step forward and swept her to him, crushing her against his breast.

She gave a glad exclamation of realization, and her own arms closed impulsively around his neck.

“You are real!  You are real!” she whispered, looking into his eyes, her gauntleted hands holding his face between them.

“Cara,” he begged, “listen to me.  It’s my last plea.  You said in the letter I have in my pocket—­there where your heart is beating—­that you could not refuse me if I came again.  Dear, this is ‘again.’  The Isis is a speck out there at sea awaiting a signal.  Will you go?  I have no throne to offer, but—­”