Pinning up her skirt, she stepped across the wall, turned round, supported herself on the ledge, groped with her foot in space and found one of the rungs. Her whole body was trembling. Her heart was beating furiously, like the clapper of a bell. Nevertheless she had the mad courage to catch hold of the two uprights and go down.
It did not take long. She knew that there were twenty rungs in all. She counted them. When she reached the twentieth, she looked to the left and murmured, with unspeakable joy:
"Oh, François . . . my darling!"
She had seen, three feet away at most, a recess, a hollow which appeared to be the entrance to a cavity cut in the rock itself.
"Stéphane . . . Stéphane," she called, but in so faint a voice that Stéphane Maroux, if he were there, could not hear her.
She hesitated a few seconds, but her legs were giving way and she no longer had the strength either to climb up again or to remain hanging where she was. Taking advantage of a few irregularities in the rock and thus shifting the ladder, at the risk of unhooking it, she succeeded, by a sort of miracle of which she was quite aware, in catching hold of a flint which projected from the granite and setting foot in the cave. Then, with fierce energy, she made one supreme effort and, recovering her balance with a jerk, she entered.
She at once saw some one, fastened with cords, lying on a truss of straw.
The cave was small and not very deep, especially in the upper portion, which pointed towards the sky rather than the sea and which must have looked, from a distance, like a mere fold in the cliff. There was no projection to bound it at the edge. The light entered freely.
Véronique went nearer. The man did not move. He was asleep.
She bent over him; though she did not recognize him for certain, it seemed to her that a memory was emerging from that dim past in which all the faces of our childhood gradually fade away. This one was surely not unknown to her: a gentle visage, with regular features, fair hair flung well back, a broad, white forehead and a slightly feminine countenance, which reminded Véronique of the charming face of a convent friend who had died before the war.