“If he touches his rifle, shoot!  Quick, Kay!”

McKay’s right hand fell into his side-pocket—­where one of his automatics lay.  He levelled it as he grasped it, hidden within the side-pocket of his coat.

“His hand is not wounded,” breathed the girl.  “If he touches his rifle he is a Hun!”

McKay’s head nodded almost imperceptibly.  Gray’s back was still turned, but one hand was extended, carelessly reaching for the rifle that stood leaning against the cake of granite.

“Don’t touch it!” said McKay in a low but distinct voice:  and the words galvanised the extended arm and it shot out, grasping the rifle, as the man himself dropped out of sight behind the rock.

A terrible stillness fell upon the place; there was not a sound, not a movement.

Suddenly the girl pointed at a shadow that moved between the rocks—­and the crash of McKay’s pistol deafened them.

Then, against the dazzling glory of the west a dark shape staggered up, clutching a wavering rifle, reeling there against the rosy glare an instant; and the girl turned her sick eyes aside as McKay’s pistol spoke again.

Like a shadow cast by hell the black form swayed, quivered, sank away outward into the blinding light that shone across the world.

Presently a tinkling sound came up from the fog-shrouded depths—­the falling rifle striking ledge after ledge until the receding sound grew fainter and more distant, and finally was heard no more.

But that was the only sound they heard; for the man himself lay still on the chasm’s brink, propped from the depths by a tuft of alpine roses in full bloom, his blue eyes wide open, a blue hole just between them, and his bandaged hand freed from its camouflage, lying palm upward and quite uninjured on the grass!

CHAPTER X

THE GREATER LOVE

As the blinding lens of the sun glittered level and its first rays poured over tree and rock, a man in the faded field-uniform of a Swiss officer of mountain artillery came out on the misty ledge across the chasm.

“You over there!” he shouted in English.  “Here is a Swiss officer to speak with you!  Show yourselves!”

Again, after waiting a few moments, he shouted:  “Show yourselves or answer.  It is a matter of life or death for you both!”

There was no reply to the invitation, no sound from the forest, no movement visible.  Thin threads of vapour began to ascend from the tremendous depths of the precipice, steaming upward out of mist-choked gorges where, under thick strata of fog, night still lay dark over unseen Alpine valleys below.

The Swiss officer advanced to the cliff’s edge and looked down upon a blank sea of cloud.  Presently he turned east and walked cautiously along the rim of the chasm for a hundred yards.  Here the gulf narrowed so that the cleft between the jutting crags was scarcely a hundred feet in width.  And here he halted once more and called across in a resonant, penetrating voice: