It was not quite easy to see how the way downstairs could have been missed.
“I hope you are easier?” I said.
“Thank you, the fomentation and re-dressing have done wonders. It pains me very little now. I shall even hope to be at work on the slip again to-morrow. Will you come and learn the rudiments of a delightful science? It is all I have to offer in return for your kindness, but to me it is much, and I think I dare promise to interest you. No, thank you, we can stay no longer. We have already trespassed too much on your friend’s hospitality. Now, shall we see you on the rocks to-morrow?”
“Yes, do come,” the girl urged, and, more from curiosity than anything else, I promised.
CHAPTER XV
A LESSON IN GEOLOGY
The next day was an eventful one. Its horrors come vividly back to me in writing of it. The curiosity which took me down to the rocks to learn a smattering of geology was at least completely satisfied, and in a way which in my most distrustful moods I little dreamt of. In a very open state of mind, I went off to the rocks. I can hardly tell my reasons, but, intuitively perhaps, I was rather more suspicious of the geologist and his daughter than I thought well to acknowledge to my friends. I kept telling myself that it was absurd.
Here was a well-known English geologist taking a hard-working holiday after the manner of his kind. And yet—the vague and unaccountable doubt in my mind pricked on my curiosity, and made me impatient to exercise my penetration in resolving the doubt into certainty one way or other.
I came upon Miss Seemarsh sitting in a sheltered cleft of the rocks high above the path, reading a yellow-back novel. She gave me a free and easy nod. “You will find my father a little way on,” she shouted, “in the next opening, I think.”