oving units are
swept along with them. This cannot be helped."

He went into his hut, and in a few minutes came out again clothed in
thick garments of a dark, earth colour, and carrying a stout staff,
steel-pointed at its end something after the fashion of a Swiss
alpenstock. He brought with him a small metal box into which he placed
the case of cylinders, covering it with a closely fitting lid. Then he
put the package into a basket made of rough twigs and strips of bark,
having a strong handle, to which he fastened a leather strap, and slung
the whole thing over his shoulders like a knapsack. Then, casting
another look round to make sure that there was no one about, he started
to walk towards a steeper descent of the hill in a totally different
direction from that which led to the "Plaza" hotel. He went swiftly, at
a steady swinging pace,--and though his way took him among confused
masses of rock, and fallen boulders, he thought nothing of these
obstacles, vaulting lightly across them with the ease of a chamois,
till he came to a point where there was a declivity running sheer down
to invisible depths, from whence came the rumbling echo of falling
water. In this almost perpendicular wall of rock were a few ledges,
like the precarious rungs of a broken ladder, and down these he
prepared to go. Clinging at first to the topmost edge of the precipice,
he let himself down warily inch by inch till his figure entirely
disappeared, sunken, as it were in darkness. As he vanished there was a
sudden cry--a rush as of wings--and a woman sprang up from amid bushes
where she had lain hidden,--it was Manella. For days and nights she had
stolen away in the intervals of her work, to watch him--and nothing had
chanced to excite her alarm till now--till now, when she had seen him
emerge from his hut and pack up the mysterious box he carried,--and
when she had heard him talking strangely to himself in a way she could
not understand.

As soon as he started to walk she followed him, pushing through heavy
brushwood and crawling along the ground where she could not be
seen;--and now,--with dishevelled hair, and staring, terrified eyes she
leaned over the edge of the precipice, baffled and desperate. Tearless
sobs convulsed her throat,--

"Oh, God of mercy!" she moaned in suffocated accents--"How can I follow
him down there! Oh, help me, Mary mother! Help me! I must--I must be
with him!"

She gathered up her hair in a close coil and wound