It bent—bent like everything—but it did not break.
And in the same minute the Guardian reached her, realizing her own rashness, her own danger, just in time to start back, kneel down upon the edge of nothing and, leaning over, grasp the girl’s wrists.
“Lord, don’t fail me. Don’t let me turn dizzy,” moaned the woman, clinging in her agony to a tree, too—the Tree of Life.
It was a branch of that Tree which answered—a very vital branch.
Almost instantaneously a presence was beside her, a fearless presence. A lad who could do flying stunts a few thousand feet in the air was stretched out at her right hand, his shoulders over the brink.
His voice, though edgy, was perfectly cool.
“Keep quiet,” he said tensely. “Hang on. Great guns! hang on tight until I can get a good grip of you. Now—now I have your wrist, just hang—as easily as possible,” to the girl into whose up-staring dark eyes a glazed reason was coming back. “There—I have you. Now we come! Let’s lift her up!”
A human chain of girls lying flat, had meanwhile formed, was holding on to the Guardian’s feet; if she—or Una—had sounded the depth of the waterfall, hundreds of feet below, it is probable that all would have done so.
Thanks to the little birch tree and that limb of daring, young Treff, all were, presently, safe back upon the Balcony, Una wrapped in Pemrose’s arms.
“There now, darling! There now—don’t look down,” cooed the latter. “You’re s-safe now. Quite safe now. And wasn’t the Guardian a ‘brick’?... Treff, too—oh! Treff, too, of course,” with an arch wink at the latter, “but he’s seasoned—he’d stand on his head in a soaring balloon—I—believe.”