ove," came the response; "and--I can't hold on here much
longer. I believe my left wrist is broken. I am suffering the torments
of hell."

Mona was almost beside herself. Roden Musgrave was in a bad way indeed
when such an admission could be wrung from him.

"Dear, don't give up!" she cried, in a wail of despairing tenderness,
such as had never been wrung from her lips before. "Make one more
effort; this time, because _I_ ask you. A yard or two more, and I shall
be able to reach you."

Was this the woman who had stood shrinkingly to gaze over the brink, and
had quickly retreated with a shudder? Now, as she lay there, extending
her arm down as far as it would go, in order to afford him the necessary
hand-grasp, all fear on her own behalf seemed to have left her. But the
man, flattened against the face of the cliff with the dead eagle slung
to his back, seemed not able to move, and as she had said, it was but a
yard or two farther.

But the effort must be made. Roden was only resting for one final
struggle. It was made. Reaching upward he grasped the extended hand,
then let go again.

"Hold it! hold it!" cried Mona, appalled by the awful whiteness which
had spread over his face, evoked as it was by the agony he was
suffering.

"No, I won't, I should only drag you down."

"You would not. I am very firm up here," she replied. "I can hold you
till--till help comes."

He wriggled up a little higher, then with his uninjured hand he grasped
hers. A sick faintness came upon him. The world seemed to go round.
The brink of the cliff, the brave, eager face and love-lit eyes, the
swaying grass bents, now rimy with misty scud, all danced before his
vision. He felt cold as ice, that deathly numbness which precedes a
faint. But for the strong, warm clasp of the hand which now held his,
Roden Musgrave's days were numbered. Well indeed was it for him, that
the splendid frame of its owner was not merely the perfection of
feminine symmetry, but encased a very considerable modicum of sheer
physical strength.

"Roden, darling!" she murmured. "Save yourself if only that you may do
so through me. You have surprised my secret, but it shall be as though
you had not, if you prefer it."

It was a strange love-making, as they faced each other thus, the one
overhanging certain death, the other raised entirely out of her physical
fears, resolute to save this life, which after all might not belong to
her. Thus they fa