ky grade itself, the ledge below,
and the mill upon it, were all gone! The crumbling outer wall of the
rocky grade had slipped away into immeasurable depths below, leaving
only the sharp edge of a cliff, which incurved towards the woods that
had once stood behind the mill, but which now bristled on the very edge
of a precipice. A mist was hanging over its brink and rising from the
valley; it was a full-fed stream that was coursing through the former
dry bed of the river and falling down the face of the bluff. He rubbed
his eyes, dismounted, crept along the edge of the precipice, and looked
below: whatever had subsided and melted down into its thousand feet of
depth, there was no trace left upon its smooth face. Scarcely an angle
of drift or debris marred the perpendicular; the burial of all ruin was
deep and compact; the erasure had been swift and sure--the obliteration
complete. It might have been the precipitation of ages, and not of a
single night. At that remote distance it even seemed as if grass were
already growing ever this enormous sepulchre, but it was only the tops
of the buried pines. The absolute silence, the utter absence of any
mark of convulsive struggle, even the lulling whimper of falling
waters, gave the scene a pastoral repose.

So profound was the impression upon Key and his human passion that it
at first seemed an ironical and eternal ending of his quest. It was
with difficulty that he reasoned that the catastrophe occurred before
Alice's flight, and that even Collinson might have had time to escape.
He slowly skirted the edge of the chasm, and made his way back through
the empty woods behind the old mill-site towards the place where he had
dismounted. His horse seemed to have strayed into the shadows of this
covert; but as he approached him, he was amazed to see that it was not
his own, and that a woman's scarf was lying over its side saddle. A
wild idea seized him, and found expression in an impulsive cry:--

"Alice!"

The woods echoed it; there was an interval of silence, and then a faint
response. But it was HER voice. He ran eagerly forward in that
direction, and called again; the response was nearer this time, and
then the tall ferns parted, and her lithe, graceful figure came
running, stumbling, and limping towards him like a wounded fawn. Her
face was pale and agitated, the tendrils of her light hair were
straying over her shoulder, and one of the sleeves of her school-gown