She said: "I shall fall if I do." He said: "My darling! My darling! Hold on, then, Essie. Dig your nails in." "Am I hurting you?" "Oh, for God's sake, Essie, hold, hold!" Next she said: "Are you slipping?" He said: "Some one will come. Some one will come. I heard a shout. Hold! Hold!" She persisted: "Are you slipping?" He said: "Yes. I'm slipping. Hold! Hold!" There isn't any need to describe anything--of his gradual slipping by her drag upon him, of his useless hands enviced in hers, of her very terrible clutch upon them. She presently said: "Tell me that what you said on the seat that night, dear." He knew. He cried most passionately: "I love you, Essie." "Truly?" From the uttermost depths of his heart: "Truly! Truly!" "More than any one?" From his soul, from all his deepest depths, from all he ever had suffered, from all he ever had been, "Essie," he cried, "before God I love you more than all the world!" She said: "You can't raise me to kiss me, can you, dear?" He said: "I can't, Essie." "Are you slipping?" He did not answer her. He was slipped almost beyond recovery. She then said: "Say that again--'before God.' I like that, dear." "Essie, Essie, before God I love you above all the world!" She gave a little sigh. She said: "Well, both of us--what's the sense to it, dear?" and she opened her fingers, and he saw her whizz, strike the face of the cliff where it jutted out, and pitch, and crash among the gorse and bracken, and roll over and over to the very edge of the outward lap above the sands, and caught there and lying there ... her jolly little dress for Whitecliffe lying there. A hand grabbed him, or he, beyond recovery of his balance, had followed her. A coastguard grabbed him and dragged him back. He said in a thick, odd voice: "What the devil's the use of that now? You fool, what the devil's the use of that?" He lay there, the rain stopped, in the sunshine. He just lay there--a minute, an hour, a year, a lifetime, eternity? They went down--a circuitous path to where she lay. They brought her up. They carried her, on a shutter, past him. He gave some wordless sound from his lips and scrambled on his knees towards their burden and threw his arms about it and clung there, with wordless sounds. One man said: "She's alive, sir." Another man said: "We'd best try to get her home before--" A third man said: "Can you walk to show us the way?" He got up and went stumbling along. CHAPTER XII THE SEEING