God! why did she say the word? Why did she put the idea into his excited brain? It had never entered his head before. He had never thought of her but in kindness. For years past, he had secretly cherished her image, suffering himself to indulge in beatific day-dreams of what his life might have been had Jenny been destined to spend it by his side--had permitted himself to enjoy her presence, to bask in her beauty, to be miserable when the thought crossed his mind that some day he would be assuredly called upon to relinquish her to another man, but never had he done less than love her. But now, as he held her in his power, and she laughed derisively into his face, whilst those words, ‘I hate you,’ still rung on the air, something entered into Henry Hindes that had never been there before. A wild fury that she should spurn him, her friend of years, and love Frederick Walcheren--a mad despair that he would never possess her beauty, and that another had the legal right to gloat over it night and day for all time--whilst he stood apart, baffled and disappointed, and then a desperate resolve to save her from further contamination and himself from a life-longing, and the devil, which is in all of us, glared out of his eyes, as with a single effort, hardly calculating what the effects would be, acting more on the impulse of what he _would do_, than of what he _was doing_, he pushed the girl violently from him and sent her light body hurling over the stupendous abyss which separated them from the beach below. It was done in a second, beyond power of recall. This moment Jenny was standing before him in her mocking loveliness--and the next there was only a void, and not even the impress of her footprints on the short herbage where she had stood.