"And yet," said McKay, "we've got to go that way, sooner or later."
There was a silence: then Gray nodded.
"Yes," he said, "but it is a question of waiting."
"There is a moon to-night," observed Evelyn Erith.
McKay lifted his head and looked at her gravely: Gray's blue eyes flashed his admiration of a young girl who quietly proposed to face an unknown precipice at night by moonlight under the rifles of ambushed men.
"After all," said McKay slowly, "is there ANY other way?"
In the silence which ensued Evelyn Erith, who had been lying between them on her stomach, her chin propped up on both hands, suddenly raised herself on one arm to a sitting posture.
Instantly Gray shrank back, white as a sheet, lifting his mutilated hand in its stiffened and bloody rags; and the girl gasped out her agonised apology:
"Oh—CAN you forgive me! It was unspeakable of me!"
"It—it's all right," said Gray, the colour coming back to his face; but the girl in her excitement of self-reproach and contrition begged to be allowed to dress the mutilated hand which her own careless movement had almost crushed.