Somewhere, not very far away, they heard the booming of General DeKay's and Mr. Noble's guns. The sport must have been fine, for the shooting was rapid. They found the stair--a zig-zag flight of crazy steps, leading up to the plateau above. In order to reach its foot, they had to stoop and creep under the low-hanging boughs of a tree. Reynolds took hold of her arm to help her. On a sudden impulse she freed herself from him. A thrill had come with his touch, and something like fear took momentary possession of her. She fled nimbly up the steps ahead of him, as if she meant to escape him entirely. He scarcely noticed her start and her haste, for some vines and tangled branches hindered him and disturbed his vision. When she emerged into the sunlight of the level space on the bluff, Mrs. Ransom stopped, ashamed of her foolish flight, and turned about just in time to look straight into the eyes of Reynolds, as he was surmounting the topmost steps. "I beat you climbing," she exclaimed, her voice shaking a little from the effect of her exertion. "I feared you had left me for good and all," he replied; "but how pale you are! Was your effort too violent? Are you ill?" "Not at all," she responded, the negative phrase peculiar to the Southern people falling with a sort of breathless readiness from her lips. "Am I really pale?" "Perhaps not," he said, seeing the rosy light coming into her cheeks again. "I only imagined it; but it is a difficult place to climb, and you came up like a bird. You shouldn't take such risks: it is dangerous." He looked about for the ruin. A tall, heavy chimney-stack rising above a tangled mass of wild vines and trees answered his inquiry. "Come this way," she said, leading on; "there is a path, further up the slope, that goes round to the entrance." He followed her quick movements, and soon she stopped before an arched doorway in the old semi-circular transom of which a few pieces of stained glass still remained. On either hand stood fragments of stuccoed pillars all festooned with vines. She paused but for a moment, then went under the arch and passed from roofless room to roofless room with the swift, certain step of one quite familiar with the place. Every where the ivy and wild grape vines had draped the crumbling walls and heaps of rubbish, so that, in places, bowers as fanciful as those of fairy-land, made a sweet crepuscular gloom, though the foliage was mostly gone. He tried to reach her side, but her quick turns and elusive movements kept her all the time just ahead of him, and her sweet voice came back to him, as if tossed to him over her shoulder, luring him on and on, in and out through the labyrinth of rooms. Once she stopped for the merest moment to look out, through a ragged opening which had once been a window, down upon the placid face of the river. He came close to her and bent low to gaze over her shoulder. She felt his breath on her neck.