ing and burning. I cursed Superstition that was slaying us
both. And I should have cursed Heaven but for the touch of Winnie's
clasping fingers, silky and soft as when I first felt them as a child
in the churchyard.

'What has happened?' asked she, looking into my face.

'Only a slip of my foot,' I said, recovering my presence of mind.

'But why do you turn back?'

'I cannot bring myself to part from you under this delicious moon,
Winnie, if you will stay a few minutes longer. Let us go and sit on
that very boulder where little Hal proposed to you.'

'But you want to go into the church,' said Winifred, as we moved back
towards the boulder.

'No, I will leave that till the morning. I would leave _anything_
till the morning, to have a few minutes longer with you on the sands.
Try to imagine that we are children again, and that I am not the
despised rich man but little Hal the cripple.'

Winifred's eyes, which had begun to look very troubled, sparkled with
delight.

'But,' said she with a sigh, as we sat down on the boulder, 'I'm
afraid we sha'n't be able to stay long. See how the tide is rising,
and the sea is wild. The tides just now, father says, come right up
to the cliff in the cove, and once locked in between Flinty Point and
Needle Point there is no escape.'

'Yes, darling,' I muttered to myself, drawing her to me and burying
my face in her bosom, 'there is one escape, only one.'

For death seemed to me the only escape from a tragedy far, far worse
than death.

If she made me any answer I heard it not; for, as I sat there with
closed eyes, schemes of escape fluttered before me and were dismissed
at the rate of a thousand a second. A fiery photograph of the cove
was burning within my brain, my mind was absorbed in examining every
cranny and every protuberance in the semicircular wall of the cliff
there depicted; over and over again I was examining that
brain-picture, though I knew every inch of it, and knew there was not
in the cliff-wall foothold for a squirrel.

X

The moon mocked me, and seemed to say:

'The blasting spectacle shining there on the other side of that heap
of earth must be passed, or Needle Point can never be reached; and
unless it is reached instantly you and she can never leave the cove.'

'Then we will never leave it,' I whispered to myself, jumping up.

As I did so I found for the first time that her forehead had been
resting against my head; for the furious rate at which