SON OF THE WIND
He could not tell whether she had slipped or purposely flung herself forward on hands and knees. In another moment she had vanished. She seemed to have melted into the face of the cliff. He shouted aloud in horror. Immediately her head and shoulders reappeared. She had neither been swallowed by an unexpected chasm nor perversely fled from him. She was waiting for him, peering at him over some invisible edge like a pale brown elf-woman, beckoning to him, as he drew nearer, offering him a helping hand which she could not compel him to take.
He drew himself up beside her, and found her sitting on a broad ledge of rock perhaps five feet deep. There had been no shadow to point it out to him from below, for the moon stood overhead; and no difference of color or perspective to trace it, since the moon, obliterating these, showed nothing but the fine line of the edge which his eye had missed. But now, upon it, he saw it was like a bench or a projecting collar, which seemed to extend all around the greater mass of the stone.
"Why did you do that?" he panted.
"Do what?"
"Rush up here ahead of me, before I could speak to you."
"Because I didn't want you to. You might have
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