“If we go down at this rate we shall be over the sea cliff,” he said.

“How glorious!” said MacIan.

When, however, they had come into the wide hollow at the bottom of that landslide, the car took a calm and graceful curve along the side of the sea, melted into the fringe of a few trees, and quietly, yet astonishingly, stopped.  A belated light was burning in the broad morning in the window of a sort of lodge- or gate-keepers’ cottage; and the girl stood up in the car and turned her splendid face to the sun.

Evan seemed startled by the stillness, like one who had been born amid sound and speed.  He wavered on his long legs as he stood up; he pulled himself together, and the only consequence was that he trembled from head to foot.  Turnbull had already opened the door on his side and jumped out.

The moment he had done so the strange young woman had one more mad movement, and deliberately drove the car a few yards farther.  Then she got out with an almost cruel coolness and began pulling off her long gloves and almost whistling.

“You can leave me here,” she said, quite casually, as if they had met five minutes before.  “That is the lodge of my father’s place.  Please come in, if you like—­but I understood that you had some business.”

Evan looked at that lifted face and found it merely lovely; he was far too much of a fool to see that it was working with a final fatigue and that its austerity was agony.  He was even fool enough to ask it a question.  “Why did you save us?” he said, quite humbly.

The girl tore off one of her gloves, as if she were tearing off her hand.  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, bitterly.  “Now I come to think of it, I can’t imagine.”

Evan’s thoughts, that had been piled up to the morning star, abruptly let him down with a crash into the very cellars of the emotional universe.  He remained in a stunned silence for a long time; and that, if he had only known, was the wisest thing that he could possibly do at the moment.

Indeed, the silence and the sunrise had their healing effect, for when the extraordinary lady spoke again, her tone was more friendly and apologetic.  “I’m not really ungrateful,” she said; “it was very good of you to save me from those men.”

“But why?” repeated the obstinate and dazed MacIan, “why did you save us from the other men?  I mean the policemen?”

The girl’s great brown eyes were lit up with a flash that was at once final desperation and the loosening of some private and passionate reserve.

“Oh, God knows!” she cried.  “God knows that if there is a God He has turned His big back on everything.  God knows I have had no pleasure in my life, though I am pretty and young and father has plenty of money.  And then people come and tell me that I ought to do things and I do them and it’s all drivel.  They want you to do work among the poor; which means reading Ruskin