And she poured her streams of warm tears over his face, and wrapped him about with her arms, and bound her body upon him. And in the fusion of that mighty love, the laboring mills of the man's mind burst free.
"Why did you come down to me?" he cried. "For God's sake get away while you have the chance. I 'm not worth saving now ... I'm only the fragments of a man.... But you!"
For all answer she bound him in tighter bondage of protection, as though she were trying to steep their souls so deep in the transport of love that they should not know death or its agony.
"If you leave me..." he urged upon her, "and get up the cliff ... there may still be time."
But she clung to him.
"For my sake, then!" he implored her. "You are my last hope of safety. For the love of me, try and do it. We must not die like this."
And for his sake, with her old desperate hopes falsely revived, she redoubled kisses of farewell upon his mouth and lips, and threw herself passionately against the relentless wet wall of their prison. Now this side, and now that. Now trying to kick out steps with her feet; now trying to tear them with her hands, she wrought at this frantic enterprise, and the man watched her, and knew it to be of no avail. And then, at his urging, she cried out—lifted her own white face to the sullen black face of the cliff, and cried—cried with words, and rent the air with inarticulate screams. But all was one. Like a thick blanket the cliff, so close upon her, muffled her mouth and I smothered the voice that issued from her.
"It 's no use ... no use," she said, and came back to the man.
And at the same moment the cruel, horrible sea, that had been boiling turbulently about the far brink of their ledge, with occasional casts of foam, thundered against the cliff, as though to the collected impulse of intent, and rushed up, roaring, and gained the summit of their slender refuge at last, and curled a scornful, devastating lip of water over it. They stood for a moment like marble, the two of them, at this clear message from the mouth of death; watching the water slide back after the retreating wave, and pour away at either side of their earthen shelf amid an appalling effervescence, and then the girl woke up again.
"It will not be long ... now," she said, very quietly.