"Madwoman," Barry said, and Kay assured him, "Nan'll be all right. No one else would, but she's got nine lives, you know."
Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching Nan's flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath, between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the path, and one would fly off the cliff's edge into space, fall down perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.
To refuse Nan's lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before Barry. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman!" Barry had said, coughing weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea. That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed with Gerda.
She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.
"My God!" It was Barry's voice again, from the rear. "Stop, Gerda ... oh, you little fool.... Stop...."
But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.
Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in her mind as she rushed.
"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."
She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle bending inward from the cliff's very edge, she did not take. She dashed on instead, straight into space, like a young Phœbus riding a horse of the morning through the blue air.