His flesh ached, his sinews creaked,
his senses reeled with the pain, the mind-agony, the horror of it all.

At last he caught a glimmer of the wet sand, less than ten feet below.
He had just landed on a bit of white tableland wantonly carved in the
naked cliff. The rough gradients which up to now had guided him in his
descent ceased abruptly. Behind him the cliff rose upwards, in front
and, to his right, and left a concave wall, straight down to the beach.

Exhausted and half-paralyzed, de Chavasse perforce had to throw himself
down these last ten feet, hardly pausing to think whether his head would
or would not come in violent contact with one of the chalk boulders
which stand out here and there in the flat sandy beach.

He threw down the lantern first, which was extinguished as it fell. Then
he took the final jump, and soon lay half-unconscious, numbed and aching
in every limb in the wet sand.

Anon he tried to move. His limbs were painful, his shoulders ached, and
he had some difficulty in struggling to his feet. An unusually large
boulder close by afforded a resting place. He reached it and sat down.
His head was still swimming but his limbs were apparently sound. He sat
quietly for a while, recouping his strength, gathering his wandering
senses. The lantern lay close to his feet, extinguished but not broken.

He groped for his tinder-box, and having found it, proceeded to relight
the tiny tallow dip. It was a difficult proceeding for the tinder was
damp, and the breeze, though very slight in this hollow portion of the
cliffs, nevertheless was an enemy to a trembling little flame.

But Sir Marmaduke noted with satisfaction that his nerves were already
under his control. He succeeded in relighting the lantern, which he
could not have done if his hands had been as unsteady as they were
awhile ago.

He rose once more to his feet, stamped them against the boulders,
stretched out his arms, giving his elbows and shoulders full play.
Mayhap he had spent a quarter of an hour thus resting since that final
jump, mayhap it had been an hour or two; he could not say for time had
ceased to be.

But the mist had penetrated to his very bones and he did not remember
ever having felt quite so cold.

Now he seized his lantern and began his search, trying to ascertain the
exact position of the portion of the cliff's edge where he and Lambert
the smith had been standing a while ago.

It was not a difficult matter, nor was t