"Don't you want to try it?" asked George, with an inner sense of strange relief on finding that Hippolyte would never succeed in accomplishing the perilous passage. "Look; someone is coming to lend us a hand."
A half-naked child ran toward them from the platform, agile as a cat, brown as a rich golden bronze. Beneath his unfaltering foot the deal boards creaked, the rafters bent. Arrived at the end of the bridge, near the strangers, he encouraged them by energetic gestures to confide in him, looking up at them with his piercing eyes like the bird at its prey.
"Don't you want to try?" repeated George, smiling.
Irresolute, she advanced one foot on the shaking plank, looked at the rocks and water, then drew back, incapable of conquering her agitation.
"I fear vertigo," she said. "I am sure I should fall."
She added, with manifest regret:
"Go, go alone. You're not afraid?"
"No. But what will you do?"
"I will sit down in the shade and wait for you."
She added again, with hesitation, as if to try and retain him: