"Are you quite sure?"
"Quite. I could not. Indeed, I could not."
"Shall we both be drowned?" he inquired.
To the girl the question came with a callousness almost brutal. Moreover, it cut her to the quick to hear how this fall had blunted the keen edge of the man's susceptibilities. It was as though another being of an altogether inferior calibre were usurping his body. Oh, that for their last agonised moments together this terrible dull veil might be rent, and for dying happiness she might know him as she had known him in the past! And for this she maintained her weeping. But inside, the man was stoking up the furnace of his mills with desperate activity, to get work out of hand before this last. He, too, was filled with ripe grain of thought to be ground, and knew how bruised and blunted he was—and how little near he could place his thoughts to the thoughts of the girl.
"What were you doing ... on the cliff?" he asked laboriously.
All his within was striving to find a short cut to somewhere, but his mouth would not let him.
"... I was going away."
"Oh! Where to?"
"... Anywhere. To Hunmouth ... round by Garthston."
"Why were you going anywhere?"