On the cairn, motionless, stood Brendon. They watched him, and presently he began to descend. Jarratt Weekes rode away. Agg took off his coat and tightened his belt.
"Be you going to help me withstand that man, Peter?" he asked calmly; but Lethbridge refused.
"No, I ban't," he answered. "I'll die in my bed a few years hence for choice. This be none of my business. You know him. The man of common strength that stands between him and her now will be broken for it. She might have been saved, but she wouldn't be, an' there's an end."
The great moment in Walter Agg's life had come.
"Broken, or not broken, I'll do what I can," he said.
They looked up the hill again to see that Daniel Brendon no longer approached them. He had caught sight of Sarah Jane far away, and already near the summit of Great Links. Instantly he changed his course, and proceeded directly over the Moor toward her.
Seeking the reason of his action, Agg and Lethbridge also marked Sarah Jane, now above a mile away on the heights.
"God Almighty, she's run for it—too late!" cried Lethbridge; but Agg had already left him. He knew that he could cut off Brendon, and started to do so. They met far below Great Links, and by the time that they did so Sarah Jane had already reached the summit. She sat there for a space, took her farewell of the world, drank her last draught of the glory of the summer sun and the splendour of the summer earth.
Like a dream picture painted in milk and gold, rich with magic light even in the pearly shadows, overflowing with the lustre and fervour of June, Devon spread before her feet and rolled in sunlit leagues to the horizons of the sea. There lacked no gracious beauty proper to that scene. It rose beyond perfection to sublimity, lifted her watching spirit higher than any praise; begot the serene, still sadness that reigns above all joy.
The mundane matter of Brendon's meeting with Agg interested her but little. Like the struggle of two ants it seemed in the midst of that huge loneliness. She saw the figures run together and turn and twist a moment. Then the lesser was shot violently away and fell sprawling. The prone atom writhed for a second and was still; the other came on.