'You are frank at any rate,' said he ruefully.
'Yes. It will do you good to hear for once in a way, that you are too conceited and philosophical. You have too much common-sense. What business has a lover to talk common-sense, I should like to know. Any one can do that. However it is useless to argue any further, Mr. Travers. My mind is made up. I will never marry a man I do not love. And I do not—care for you, as you would have me.'
'But will you not try and love me?'
'Love does not come by trying,' quoth the maiden sententiously.
'Nevertheless I will not despair. But meanwhile I hope you will not let this interfere with our arrangements for this last day, or with your stay here. I cannot get a telegram summoning me on urgent business till the morning. But I will go then. This afternoon you know you promised to come on an expedition to see our Donegal cliffs, and the Pigeons' Cave especially; while I am to get you those cormorant's eggs you wished for.'
'Very well, I will go.'
At the appointed time they set out on an Irish car. In the well Travers, who was driving, took a stake with a pulley at the end and a coil of rope, a relic of his boyhood's days, when he used to be great at bird's-nesting. The party consisted to all intents and purposes of himself and Miss Derwent. The other three, two men and a girl, were mere nonentities, who had been invited as make-weights. Travers, with still unsubdued pride of intellect, had christened them in his own mind as the Fool, the Idiot, and the Inane Girl.
When they arrived at Kilcross, the other four went down a winding path on the side of the cliff, and proceeded along the shore in the direction of the Pigeons' Cave. Travers went across the headlands to the same spot, and fixed his stake in the turf above some crevices in the rock, where he knew of old he would find the cormorant's eggs he was in search of. He would first join the rest of the party, he thought, in their sight-seeing. Afterwards they would all come up to the top and lower him down in search of his prey.
By the time he had finished arranging the stake, the others were underneath him. So he shouted to them he would come the shortest way down. Lowering the rope until the bight at the end touched the rocks below, he fastened the upper end by twisting it a couple of times round the stake, and thrusting the slack carelessly, as he afterwards remembered, under the part of the rope between the top round and the pulley. There would only be a very slight strain for a few moments in sliding down, and he had often before descended a rope fastened like that.
He lowered himself gently over the edge of the cliff, and this time, as usual, slid safely down, landing at the feet of the four below.