in
with each whiff philosophy and peace. So the Major smoked and thought,
till a bark from the staghound made him look up. On the top of the
cliffs on the other side of the stream, looking down into the valleys
below, with her head turned away from him, stood Violet Tressillian; and
at the sight of that graceful figure, with its indescribable high-bred
air, I don't doubt the Major's once unimpressive heart beat faster than
it had ever done in a charge or a skirmish. She was full twenty feet
above him, and the rocks on which she stood sloped precipitately down to
a ledge exactly opposite that on which he lay smoking--a ledge in
reality but a few inches wide, but to which the treacherous boughs and
ferns waving over it gave a semblance of a firm broad footing--a
semblance which (like a good many other things one meets with) it
utterly failed to carry out when you came to try it.

Violet, not seeing Telfer lying _perdu_ among the grass at the foot of
his plane-tree, walked along to the edge of the cliff, her eyes on the
ground, so deep in thought that she never noticed the river beneath, but
began to descend the slope, little Floss coming with exceeding
trepidation after her. Telfer sprang up to warn her. "Violet! Violet! go
back! go back! Oh! my God, do you not hear?"

His passionate tones startled her. Never dreaming he was there, she
looked hurriedly up; her foot slipped; unable to stay her descent, she
came down the steep cliff with an impetus which, to a certainty, would
send her over the narrow ledge into the river below--a fall of full
thirty feet. To see her perish thus before his eyes--die thus while he
stood calmly by! A whole age of torture was crowded into the misery of
that one brief moment. There was but one way to save her. He sprang
across the gulf that parted them, while the river in its straitened bed
hissed and foamed beneath him, and, standing on the narrow ledge, where
there seemed scarce footing for a dog, he caught her as she fell in his
iron grasp, as little swayed by the shock as the rock on which he stood.
Holding her tight to him with one arm, he swung himself down by the
other to a less dangerous position, on a flat plateau of cliff, and
leaning against one of the linden-trees on its summit, he bent over her;
his eyes dim, and his pulses beating with the emotions he had controlled
while he wanted cool thought and firm nerve to save her, but over which
he had no more power now. He pressed her to