A labourer came by. "Who is that yonder?" he asked.
"I reckon any fool knows," answered the clown. "That be our young lady, Mistress Urith."
"Take my horse, fellow," said Anthony, and dismounted.
He went over the moor in pursuit of the girl, and found her seated on the rock with a foot swinging over the precipice. She was so startled when he spoke to her as almost to lose her balance. He caught her hand, and she rose to her feet.
They stood on a ledge. Two towers of rock rose with a cleft between them like a window. The shelves of the granite were matted with whortleberry leaves, now all ranges of colour from green, through yellow to carmine, and with grey moss. A vein of porphyry penetrating the granite striped it with red, and Nature had tried her delicate pencil on the stone, staining or stippling it with her wondrously soft-toned lichenous paints. Below, at the depth of five hundred feet, the river roared over its red porphyry barrier, throwing into the air foam bubbles that were caught by the wind and carried up, and danced about, and sported with as are feathers by a wanton child. The great side of Stannon Down opposite, rising to sixteen hundred feet, was covered by flying shadows of forget-me-not blue and pale sulphurous gleams of sun. As the light glided over it, it picked out the strange clusters of old circular huts and enclosures, some with their doors and lintels unthrown down, that were inhabited by an unknown race before history began.
Anthony put his arm round Urith. "We stand," said he, "on the edge of a chasm; a step, a start, and one or other—perhaps both—fall into the abyss to sheer destruction. Let me hold you; I would not let you go—if you went, it would not be alone."
Urith did not answer; a trembling fit came on her. She stood, she felt, at the brink of another precipice than that before her eyes.
"I could not keep away," said Anthony. "I have got into trouble with every one, and I was afraid that you also would be set against me; so, after I had been to see about your father's grave, that all was right there—and Bessie had laid a garland of flowers on it—then I came back here. I thought I must see you and explain what I forgot to say this morning."
"You need say no more about that matter," answered Urith. "I told you at the time that I believed your word. You said you intended no ill. I am sure of that, quite sure. I know it is not in you to hurt."
"And yet I have hurt you and your mother, and also Fox Crymes." Then he told her how he had struck him, and that he was afraid he had seriously injured his eye.