ut to Albert it seemed that she was standing
much too near the edge. She could not see it, of course, but from where
he stood he could see that the bank at that point was much undercut by
the winter rains and winds, and although the sod looked firm enough from
above, in reality there was little to support it. Her standing there
made him a trifle uneasy and he had a mind to shout and warn her.
He hesitated, however, and as he watched she stepped back of her own
accord. He turned, re-entered the grove and started to walk back to the
pavilion.

He had scarcely done so when he heard a short scream followed by a
thump and a rumbling, rattling sound. He turned like a flash, his heart
pounding violently.

The bluff edge was untenanted. A semi-circular section of the sod where
Helen had stood was missing. From the torn opening where it had been
rose a yellow cloud of dust.

CHAPTER VI

A goodly number of the South Harniss "natives," those who had not seen
him play tennis, would have been willing to swear that running was, for
Albert Speranza, an impossibility. His usual gait was a rather languid
saunter. They would have changed their minds had they seen him now.

He ran along that path as he had run in school at the last track meet,
where he had been second in the hundred-yard dash. He reached the spot
where the sod had broken and, dropping on his knees, looked fearfully
over. The dust was still rising, the sand and pebbles were still
rattling in a diminishing shower down to the beach so far below. But he
did not see what he had so feared to see.

What he did see, however, was neither pleasant nor altogether
reassuring. The bluff below the sod at its top dropped sheer and
undercut for perhaps ten feet. Then the sand and clay sloped outward and
the slope extended down for another fifty feet, its surface broken by
occasional clinging chunks of beach grass. Then it broke sharply again,
a straight drop of eighty feet to the mounds and dunes bordering the
beach.

Helen had of course fallen straight to the upper edge of the slope,
where she had struck feet first, and from there had slid and rolled to
the very edge of the long drop to the beach. Her skirt had caught in
the branches of an enterprising bayberry bush which had managed to find
roothold there, and to this bush and a clump of beach grass she was
clinging, her hands outstretched and her body extended along the edge of
the clay precipice.

Albert gasped.

"