He wanted to have a look round the other
side of it. He went,--and he never came back."
"He fell?" Dinah turned a shocked face upon him. "Oh, how dreadful!"
"He must have fallen. The ledge dwindled on the other side of the rock to
little more than four feet in width for about six yards. There was a
sheer drop below into the pool. A man of steady nerve, accustomed to
mountaineering, would make nothing of it; and, from what Isabel has told
me of him, I gather he was that sort of man. But on that particular
afternoon something must have happened. Perhaps his happiness had
unsteadied him a bit, for they were absolutely happy together. Or it may
have been the heat. Anyhow he fell, he must have fallen. And no one
ever knew any more than that."
"How dreadful!" Dinah whispered again. "And she was left--all alone?"
"Quite alone except for the natives, and they didn't find her till the
day after. She was pacing up and down the ledge then, up and down, up and
down eternally, and she refused--flatly refused--to leave it till he
should come back. She had spent the whole night there alone, waiting,
getting more and more distraught, and they could do nothing with her.
They were afraid of her. Never from that day to this has she admitted for
a moment that he must have been killed, though in her heart she knows it,
poor girl, just as she knew it from the very beginning.
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