“That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there nobody nearer?”
“No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.”
“He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or stick of any kind on the common?”
She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and grass.
A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.
Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.
Chapter XXII
“A woman’s way.”
Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his dismay.
He still clutched the face of the escarpment—not with the frenzied hold of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of his every jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to Elfride’s intentions, whatever they might be.