She caught her foot in a moss-seamed crack of the sloping rock that skirted this right wing of the precipice.
In the effort to dislodge it she set herself rolling.
Before a hand could reach her, before an eye could take in just what had happened, she was rolling downward—a scapegoat doll—from the brow to the lip of nothing.
CHAPTER XVI
The Lip
It was the Guardian who reached her first, almost stepping over the edge of the abyss herself—in her recklessness about anything but saving the girl.
So quickly, had that girl rolled down the moss-seamed rock, a dummy—a bundle of inanimate clothing—that such wild clutchings as her poor hands made at moss and grass and helpless leaf seemed but mechanical twitchings!
Automatic twitchings to those who watched her, without a cry—lest a cry, should cut the last chance!
But in the human dummy, when consciousness is swooning, there is a something which looks after that last chance.
Over the first fold of the terrible lip, in the very teeth of the precipice, earth-embedded, there grew a little tree—a stunted little midget of a birch tree.
That which took care of Una’s last chance, clutched it—and hung on.