“Well, I won’t! but I must go and leave you for a bit.”
“I can’t bear it. You shan’t go and leave me! There, I think my ankle’s better now, and it doesn’t seem so dark. You can’t be above twenty feet above me; and that’s nothing, is it?”
“No, nothing at all,” replied Mark hoarsely.
“Then I am going to climb up.”
“Yes, be careful, and—”
“Oh, Mark! Mark!”
His cousin’s cry seemed to hiss strangely past the lad’s ears. Then there was a moment or two’s silence and a horrible splash, followed by the washing of water against the sides of the black chasm down which Mark was straining his eyes to gaze, and then whisper after whisper, soft and strange, until they died away.