s midst but for the splash and
gurgle of the beck. I fancied this grew louder as I paused and listened
in my helplessness. All at once--was it the tongue of Nature telling me
the way, or common gumption returning at the eleventh hour? I ran down
to the water's edge, and could have shouted for joy. Great stones lay in
equal profusion on bed and banks. I lifted one of the heaviest in both
hands. I staggered with it to the wall. I came back for another; for
some twenty minutes I was so employed; my ultimate reward a fine heap of
boulders against the wall.

Then I began to build; then mounted my pile, clawing the wall to keep
my balance. My fingers were still many inches from the coping. I jumped
down and gave another ten minutes to the back-breaking work of carrying
more boulders from the water to the wall. Then I widened my cairn below,
so that I could stand firmly before springing upon the pinnacle with
which I completed it. I knew well that this would collapse under me if
I allowed my weight to rest more than an instant upon it. And so at last
it did; but my fingers had clutched the coping in time; had grabbed it
even as the insecure pyramid crumbled and left me dangling.

Instantly exerting what muscle I had left, and the occasion gave me,
I succeeded in pulling myself up until my chin was on a level with my
hands, when I flung an arm over and caught the inner coping. The other
arm followed; then a leg; and at last I sat astride the wall, panting
and palpitating, and hardly able to credit my own achievement. One great
difficulty had been my huge revolver. I had been terribly frightened it
might go off, and had finally used my cravat to sling it at the back
of my neck. It had shifted a little, and I was working it round again,
preparatory to my drop, when I saw the light suddenly taken from the
window in the tower, and a kerchief waving for one instant in its place.
So she had been waiting and watching for me all these hours! I dropped
into the garden in a very ecstasy of grief and rapture, to think that I
had been so long in coming to my love, but that I had come at last. And
I picked myself up in a very frenzy of fear lest, after all, I should
fail to spirit her from this horrible place.

Doubly desolate it looked in the rays of that bright October moon.
Skulking in the shadow of the wall which had so long baffled me, I
looked across a sharp border of shade upon a chaos, the more striking
for its lingering trim desi