"Do I feel like a dead man?" he laughed. Then he pulled them both indoors. A couple of tumblers and a spirit-case stood on the table. "Do you see those, Gabriel?" he asked, pointing to the glasses. "I was so sure of your coming that I made ready for you. Don't look so scared, man! Put down this brandy, and you'll see things a bit more squarely."
The brandy did wonders for Gabriel; it gave him nerve, and discounted the supernatural. Griff showed plainly enough now as a being of flesh and blood.
"Tell me about it," he said at last.
"There is little to tell. A touch of fight wasn't amiss, but we were fools to stand at the edge of the quarry. You got me over your head—the devil knows how you did it—and the next thing was that I found myself stuck in the middle of a thorn-bush growing out of the rock-side. My face will show you that I had a pretty warm reception. When I got the hang of things again, and began to wonder how I was to climb out of the mess, I remembered that hospitable thorn-bush well; I used to come bird's-nesting there when I was a boy, and I reached it by a broadish ledge of rock that jutted out from side to side of the quarry just below the bush. I let the dizziness get clear, and a crawl of a few yards brought me safe across. That's the whole story."
"But I heard you splash into the water," said Gabriel.
"That you didn't! I'll warrant that, and I ought to know. What you heard, I fancy, was a big stone that came tumbling down from above while I was stuck in the bush; it missed my head by about six inches."
"Then I nearly killed you twice," murmured the preacher. "I remember loosening a piece of the wall when I fell back against it. Griff, lad, I have done you a fearful wrong."
"Fudge; drop that sickly over-sentimentality of yours. Misses don't count in the rough-and-tumble of life, and anyhow it was a sheer mischance.—So you've arranged matters, you two, at last? Well, it was about time. Gabriel is so dull-witted, Miss Rotherson, where his happiness is concerned."
Greta wondered that he could stoop to light banter at such a time. But she looked at him more closely, and she read in his face what the effort meant to him. Yet Griff was smiling a moment later with genuine merriment; he was thinking that it was a more awkward scene for Gabriel than if he had really been dead, instead of very much alive.
"Does your wife know?" asked Gabriel, suddenly.