She got up and came to him and went through the doorway before him and through the outer door. He slammed it behind him, and they passed out from Whitehouse and up the lane, and out upon the cliffs and turned along them homeward. Raining. He carried her cloak but did not offer it her. A wind blew gustily from off the land that frequently buffetted him, and her, and at whose buffettings and at the slippery foothold of the rain-swept grass he angrily exclaimed. IV She walked to seaward of him close along the cliff's edge. Here the cliff fell sharply a few feet, then overhung an outward lap of gorse and bracken, sheer then to the sands. Once as they pressed and slipped their way along, he caught her eyes. She was crying. He sneered: "You can tell your father and mother!" She caught her breath to answer him: "As if--I should!" "What are you crying about, then?" "Didn't I think you loved me--truly!" They were approaching the little coastguard station of Yexley Gap. Damn this rain. Damn this slippery grass. Damn this infernal wind. A fiercer gust came blustering seaward. He caught with both hands at his hat--nearly gone. Essie's cloak upon his arm blew across his eyes--blinded him, and he had to stop. She didn't scream. It was not a cry. She just, in perplexity, in puzzlement, in trouble as it were, said "_Arthur!_" She was balancing. She was struck by the wind and balancing--balancing with her body and with her arms, and looking at him as if she did not quite know what was happening to her; and in the like perplexity said to him "_Arthur!_"--balancing, over-balancing. There were not ten feet between them. He rushed, and slipped as he rushed. It was like running with those leaden feet of nightmare. It seemed to him an immense time before he reached her. A horrible, blundering, unspeakable business, then. The cloak, the accursed cloak, got between them--between them. A jumbling, ghastly, blundering business, their hands fumbling on either side of it. Was this going on for ever and ever? The accursed cloak fumbled itself away. Ah, God, now it was their naked hands that were fumbling--all wet and slippery with rain, seeming to be all fists and no fingers and only knocking against one another instead of catching hold. And not a word said, and only very quick breathing, and jumbling and fumbling and jumbling. Look here, this fumbling, she's falling, toppling; is this going on for ever and ever and ever? It was her hands that in the last wild, hideous fumbling clutched his. She toppled right back. He fell. He was face downwards upon the slippery grass, to his waist almost over the cliff, and slipping, slipping, and she had his hands--the backs of his hands over the knuckles so that his fingers were imprisoned and useless, and there she hung and dragged him, and he was slipping. He said: "O God, Essie! O God! Can't you get your hands higher up, so I can hold you, instead of you holding me?"