"It is no use..." she said, her tears streaming, her hands all muddied, that she wiped hopelessly on her skirts. "... I can find no way."
"Oh," he said, so apathetically, that for a moment she thought he had not understood. But it was only the mills that were grinding.
"It is all my fault," the girl burst out bitterly. "If I had run to the Dixons' at once ... they would have been here now ... and saved you. But I never thought. I was in such a hurry.... Oh, forgive me ... forgive me, please!"
And into her hands, for the man's sake, she sobbed as though her heart would have burst. It was so dreadful for him to be lost like this, when she had been so near to saving him. For herself it mattered nothing, who had so little to lose. And though she strove to extinguish the thought, there was a kind of proud, defiant exultation at being drowned in such company. Oh, God forgive her such wicked thinking! Her heart, so anguished during these latter days, could not, in its wildest moments, have wished a more companionable death than this.
After awhile, the mills of the man's mind, slowly moving, ground a little grist for his lips to get rid of.
"... Can you get up the cliff by yourself, if you leave me?"
He seemed to be talking to her out of the closed chamber of dreams. What he uttered reached her, indeed, but there was something between them yet, like a wall, that both were sensible of.
"But I would not ... I would not!" she cried impetuously.
"But could you?"
"No, no, no ... I could not!"