her impossible, she
thought that he only spoke in fun, then she knew that he was in earnest,
that he was ordering her. But it was impossible--absolutely. Then she
jumped with arms raised, jumped into two great hands that clipped her
round the waist and brought her, feet to ground, with scarcely a jar.

"I didn't think you'd have done it," said he. "You ain't wanting in
pluck."

"I knew it would be all right if you told me," said she, "but I didn't
want to do it until the very last moment."

After that she would have jumped over a cliff if he had told her. It
seemed to her that he was invincible--infallible.

A climb of a couple of minutes brought them down to the tide mark rocks,
the tide was a quarter out and the sea comparatively calm and the rocks
flat-topped like those of the seal beach and free from seaweed except
where, here and there, were piled masses of giant kelp torn up from its
deep sea attachments and cast here by the waves. It lay in ridges that
had to be climbed over sometimes and seemed entirely confined to the
Lizard Point and the rocks beyond, for when they reached where the
cliffs began it ceased to occur.

Where the cliffs began they first experienced the true meaning of a
journey along that coast.

She had seen these cliffs from the boat, but that view, though
forbidding enough, had told her little of the reality.

They rose from two to four hundred feet in height, these cliffs, and
looking up was like looking up a wall of polished ebony.

Here and there they were streaked with long lines of white where the
guillemots in their thousands sat on ledges, and here and there they
were faced by seaward rocks standing out in the water and carved by the
waves into all sorts of fantastic shapes, but waves and rocks and sea
and sky, all these were nothing, here the cliffs were everything,
dominating the mind and soul, sinister, and tinging every sound from the
wave echoes to the gull voices with tragedy.

And high tide mark was the cliff base in fine weather, in foul, the
waves would lash and dash and beat fifty feet up, there was not a
guillemot ledge lower than eighty feet, puffins, razorbills and
kittiwakes, who always build above the guillemots did not seem to come
here at all, keeping to the seaward rocks and the coast line where the
cliffs drew further away from the sea.

With the sea so close on the right and the cliffs on the left the girl
felt like a mouse in a trap designed for an eleph