le strip of
radiant stars seemed to dance in one dazzling ocean of light. His
stupefaction reasserted itself. He sank down in dead unconsciousness.
Was it slumber or death?

It was not death. Renshaw awoke at last; awoke to consciousness in a
strange half-light. Above was a roof of overhanging rock--underneath
him, too, was the same hard rock. A strip of sky, now a pale blue, was
all he could see.

Raising himself upon his elbow, he looked forth. The sun was setting in
a blood-red curtain of cloud beyond the distant mountain peaks, shedding
a fiery glow upon the stupendous chain of iron cliffs which overhung the
weird and desolate defile. It came home to Renshaw then, that he must
have slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

He still felt terribly weak, and his dazed and dizzy brain was still
beclouded as in a fog. The events of yesterday, of his lifetime, in
fact, seemed but as a far-away and uncertain dream. At any rate he
could die in peace here--in peace with all mankind. He felt no fear of
death, he had faced it too often. The utter loneliness of his last
hours seemed to hold no terrors for him either, and he even found
himself drowsily thinking that such surroundings--the grim, beetling
cliffs, the wild and rugged peaks, the utter desolation of this remote
untrodden solitude--were meet witnesses to the last hours of one who had
spent the bulk of his life in their midst. His mind went back to the
present undertaking and its disastrous results--to the "Valley of the
Eye," to Sellon's selfish treachery--and his own self-sacrifice. But
for that same act of treachery, tardily repented of as it was, they
would both have got out safe, for it was during the time thus lost that
the horde of Bushmen and Korannas had stolen up to surprise them. Ah,
well, what did it matter now? What did anything matter? The treasure--
the precious stones which he had thrown into the balance against his own
life--what did they count now? He had enough of them about him at that
moment to place him in affluent circumstances, had it been willed that
he should live. Yet of what account were they now? Mere dross.

Then there arose before him a vision of Sunningdale--the cool, leafy
garden, the spreuws piping among the fig trees, the plashing murmur of
the river, and Violet Avory, as he had last seen her--no not then so
much as at the moment when she had extracted that promise. Well, he had
kept his promise, at any rate. And t