Rufus Sterne was lying helpless—helpless because he had risked his life to save her from the consequences of her folly. And all the while the tide was coming in, and he would be watching it rising higher and higher, and if help did not reach him before the cold salt water swept over his face, he would be drowned, and she would be the cause of his death.
How she climbed the zig-zag path out of Penwith Cove she never knew. She ran and ran until she felt as though she could not go a step farther even to save her life, and if her own life only had been at stake she would have lain down on the cliffs and taken her chance.
But it was his life that was in jeopardy, and to her excited imagination his life seemed of more value than the lives of a hundred ordinary people.
She had read of heroes in her girlhood days, and thrilled over the story of their exploits, but no hero of fact or fiction had ever so touched her heart as this lonely man who was lying helpless at the foot of the cliffs, watching with patient and suffering eyes the inflowing of the tide.
"Oh! he must be saved," she kept saying to herself, "for he deserves to live. And I must be the means of saving him."
She stumbled into St. Gaved rather than ran. Her hat had disappeared, her glorious hair fell in billows on her shoulders and down her back, her eyes were wild and tearless, her lips wide apart, her breath came and went in painful gasps. She nearly stumbled over one or two children, and then she pulled up suddenly in front of a policeman.
Constable Greensplat stared at her as though she had escaped from Bodmin lunatic asylum.
"There's—not—a—moment—to—be—lost," she began, and she brought out the words in jerks. "Rufus Sterne is lying with a broken leg at the foot of the cliffs half-way between here and Penwith Cove."
Then she staggered to a lamp-post and put her arm round it. A small group of people gathered in a moment.
"How did he break his leg?" Greensplat asked, putting on an official air.