“Oh!” she exclaimed as though the last few moments had not been lived through, “there is the most wonderfulest flower!” Her voice was disappointment-laden. “And it’s just out of reach.”
Saxon had regained control of himself. He answered with a composure too calm to be genuine and an almost flippant note that rang false.
“Of course. The most wonderfulest things are always just out of reach. The edelweiss grows only among the glaciers, and the excelsior crop must be harvested on inaccessible pinnacles.”
He came and looked over the edge, stopping close to her shoulder. He wanted to demonstrate his regained command of himself. A delicate purple flower hung on the cliff below as though it had been placed there to lure men over the edge.
He looked down the sheer drop, appraised with his eye the frail support of a jutting root, then slipped quietly over, resting by his arms on the ledge of rock and groping for the root with his toe.
With a short, gasping exclamation, the girl bent forward and seized both his elbows. Her fingers clutched him with a strength belied by their tapering slenderness.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
She was kneeling on the ledge, and in her eyes, only a few inches from his own, he read, not only alarm, but back of that in the depths of the pupils something else. It might have been the reflection of what she had a few moments before read in his own. He could feel the soft play of her breath on his forehead, and his heart pounded so wildly that it seemed to him he must raise his voice to be heard above it. Yet, his words and smile were sane.
“I am going to gather flowers,” he assured her. “You see,” he added with an irrelevant whimsicality, “I want to see if the unattainable is really beyond me.”
“If you go,” she said with ominous quietness of voice, “I shall come, too.”