with him that could save me. Is there a pole or
stick of any kind on the common?'

She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and
grass.

A minute--perhaps more time--was passed in mute thought by both. On a
sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the
bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

Chapter XXII

'A woman's way.'

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along
the line of coast between Exmoor and Land's End; but this outflanked and
encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are not
safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of air-currents,
as Knight had now found, to his dismay.

He still clutched the face of the escarpment--not with the frenzied
hold of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of
his every jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to
Elfride's intentions, whatever they might be.

He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade, not
an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the past. The
inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all strugglers for
life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the paucity of tufts
of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost ledges.

Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride's hasty disappearance, but
could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a
doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole chance of
deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and
this possibility was remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was
left so untended that they were unenclosed for miles, except by a
casual bank or dry wall, and were rarely visited but for the purpose
of collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of
subsistence thereon.

At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited
him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected
with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature's treacherous
attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a
huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which
enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see
the vertical face curving round