then. I told them that you were saved by me. My shout checked
you..." She moved her head gently from right to left in negation.--"No?
Well, have it your own way."

I thought to myself: She has found another issue. She wants to forget
now. And no wonder. She wants to persuade herself that she had never
known such an ugly and poignant minute in her life. "After all," I
conceded aloud, "things are not always what they seem."

Her little head with its deep blue eyes, eyes of tenderness and anger
under the black arch of fine eyebrows was very still. The mouth looked
very red in the white face peeping from under the veil, the little
pointed chin had in its form something aggressive. Slight and even
angular in her modest black dress she was an appealing and--yes--she was
a desirable little figure.

Her lips moved very fast asking me:

"And they believed you at once?"

"Yes, they believed me at once. Mrs Fyne's word to us was `Go!'"

A white gleam between the red lips was so short that I remained
uncertain whether it was a smile or a ferocious baring of little even
teeth. The rest of the face preserved its innocent, tense and
enigmatical expression. She spoke rapidly.

"No, it wasn't your shout. I had been there some time before you saw
me. And I was not there to tempt Providence, as you call it. I went up
there for--for what you thought I was going to do. Yes. I climbed two
fences. I did not mean to leave anything to Providence. There seem to
be people for whom Providence can do nothing. I suppose you are shocked
to hear me talk like that?"

I shook my head. I was not shocked. What had kept her back all that
time, till I appeared on the scene below, she went on, was neither fear
nor any other kind of hesitation. One reaches a point, she said with
appalling youthful simplicity, where nothing that concerns one matters
any longer. But something did keep her back. I should have never
guessed what it was. She herself confessed that it seemed absurd to
say. It was the Fyne dog.

Flora de Barral paused, looking at me with a peculiar expression and
then went on. You see, she imagined the dog had become extremely
attached to her. She took it into her head that he might fall over or
jump down after her. She tried to drive him away. She spoke sternly to
him. It only made him more frisky. He barked and jumped about her
skirt in his usual, idiotic, high spirits. He scampered away in circles
betw