There was a spot where you drove off the crowded highway, down half a block of unfinished dirt road with a low wooden rail at the end. The rail barred the street-end from a hundred-foot drop down the cliffside to piles of crushed rock that were to be a new dock soon. And the rail was very flimsy and a little rotten. And there was a great tree that grew at the cliff's edge and flung one branch straight over the road so low that a car's top almost scraped it. * * * * * Another car was parked in the road-end when Gruin got there with Maria, in spite of the December cold. Gruin had to wait for this car to leave. He put his arm around Maria, meanwhile gazing upward to be sure that he had stopped the roadster directly under the low branch of the big tree. "It is cold," said Maria, shivering in spite of her fur. "Would we not be warmer with the top up?" "The air tastes good," said Gruin hastily. It would ruin his plan if the roadster's top were put up. He had to have a clear space above him. The other car left. He and Maria were alone in the open roadster under the December stars. "Are you sick?" said Maria, gazing at him in the dashlight. "No, no. Not at all," said Gruin, whose teeth showed a tendency to chatter. Maria looked deep into his eyes. Something mystic and inexorable in her black ones.... "Eldon, you are acting very strangely. It is not that you are thinking of breaking your promise?" "Of course not," Gruin said hastily. Maria's eyes still searched his, aflame with infatuation, and with tempestuous resolve. The light from the roadster's dash showed on little red heels, on a length of silk stocking that even now could make Gruin's pulses jerk a trifle, on soft white flesh with a twisted garter under it--on a slim little dagger! Then slowly her skirt went down again. "I think we'd better leave," Gruin said, a trifle thickly. God! this was the kind of thing you read about in the funny papers. You didn't dream, at first, that it would force you to murder.... "We'll go," he said hoarsely. He started the car, and shifted to first gear with the clutch pressed down. He raced the motor, pulling out the hand throttle on the dash so that the engine speed would maintain itself. "Why are you making the engine go so fast?" said Maria. "The motor's cold--have to warm it up...." With the words, Gruin stood up suddenly, as nearly erect as the wheel would let him. His fingers hooked over the overhanging tree branch--and his foot left the clutch. [Illustration: "His fingers hooked over the branch and his foot left the clutch."] The scream of tires spinning from sudden power of a roaring, full-throttled motor mingled with Maria José's shriek. The roadster leaped toward the wooden rail at the edge of the cliff, with Gruin hanging over the road behind.