a moment she closed her eyes. Only by dogged force of will could
she even retain her present position, half crouching, half lying on the
ill-matched steps. It almost seemed as though some power were drawing
her, compelling her to relax her muscles and slide down, down into
those awful depths. Then the memory of a half-caught phrase she had
overheard flashed across her mind: "If you feel giddy, always look up,
not down." As though in obedience to some inner voice, she opened her
eyes and looked up to where, only a few battered steps above, she could
see the door of the castle.

If she could only make it! Rising cautiously to her knees she crawled
up one more step and rested a moment, digging her fingers into the
crevices of the rock and finding a precarious foothold against a
projecting ledge. Keeping her eyes fixed upon the door she scrambled
up a few inches further, then paused again, exhausted with the strain.

Two more steps remained. Two more desperate efforts, while she fought
the hideous temptation to look downwards. For an instant she almost
lost all knowledge of what she was doing. Guided only by instinct--the
instinct of self-preservation--her eyes still straining painfully in
that enforced upward gaze, she at last reached the door.

With a strangled sob of relief she knelt up against it and inserted the
big iron key, with numbed fingers turning it in the lock. The heavy
door opened, and Nan clung to it with both hands till it had swung back
sufficiently to admit her. Then, from the security of the castle
itself, she pushed it to and locked it on the inside, as the old woman
at the cottage had bidden her, thrusting the key into the pocket of her
sports coat.

She was safe! Around her were the walls of the ancient castle--walls
that seemed almost part of the solid rock itself standing betwixt her
and that horrible abyss below! . . . Her limbs gave way suddenly and
she toppled over in a dead faint, lying in a little crumpled heap at
the foot of the wall.

It was very quiet up there within King Arthur's Castle. The tourists
who, mayhap, had visited it earlier in the day were gone; no one would
come again to-night to disturb the supreme stillness. The wan cry of
the gulls drifted eerily across the sea. Once an enquiring sheep
approached the slim young body lying there, stirless and inert, and
sniffed at it, then moved away again and lay down to chew the cud.

The golden disc of the sun dropped