great lonely tarn. It
was a wonderful place but very savage, horribly desolate. They rested
after the meal, and then, Isabel being still tired, he left her to bask
in the sunshine while he went a little further. He told her to wait for
him. He was only going round the corner. There was a great bastion of
rock jutting on to the ledge. He wanted to have a look round the other
side of it. He went,--and he never came back."

"He fell?" Dinah turned a shocked face upon him. "Oh, how dreadful!"

"He must have fallen. The ledge dwindled on the other side of the rock to
little more than four feet in width for about six yards. There was a
sheer drop below into the pool. A man of steady nerve, accustomed to
mountaineering, would make nothing of it; and, from what Isabel has told
me of him, I gather he was that sort of man. But on that particular
afternoon something must have happened. Perhaps his happiness had
unsteadied him a bit, for they were absolutely happy together. Or it may
have been the heat. Anyhow he fell, he must have fallen. And no one
ever knew any more than that."

"How dreadful!" Dinah whispered again. "And she was left--all alone?"

"Quite alone except for the natives, and they didn't find her till the
day after. She was pacing up and down the ledge then, up and down, up and
down eternally, and she refused--flatly refused--to leave it till he
should come back. She had spent the whole night there alone, waiting,
getting more and more distraught, and they could do nothing with her.
They were afraid of her. Never from that day to this has she admitted for
a moment that he must have been killed, though in her heart she knows it,
poor girl, just as she knew it from the very beginning."

"But what happened?" breathed Dinah. "What did they do? They couldn't
leave her there."

"They didn't know what to do. The _shikari_ was the only one with any
ideas among them, and he wasn't especially brilliant. But after another
day and night he hit on the notion of sending one of the coolies back
with the news while he and the other men waited and watched. They kept
her supplied with food. She must have eaten almost mechanically. But she
never left that ledge. And yet--and yet--she was kept from taking the one
step that would have ended it all. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't
have been better--more merciful--" He broke off.

"Perhaps God was watching her," murmured Dinah shyly.

"Yes, I tell myself that. But even so, I can