At twelve o'clock a wind set in from the east, redoubling the rain, but rapidly dispelling the fog. In an hour every place where he could possibly have concealed himself had been searched, and with one mind they came back to the point of rocks. They lay out on the wet ledge and looked over with fear and trembling, half expecting to see his mangled body below. They could see clearly to the foot of the precipice, and there was nothing there but the smooth, trackless snow; and then when they drew back they looked in each other's faces and knew for the first time how much they loved Philip and how much each was to the other. They were almost certain now that he had fallen over one face of the mountain or the other. Yesterday they could have followed his track in the thin snow, but now the rain, which was still falling heavily, had obliterated one after melting what remained of the other. They went together down the ladders, and for its whole length along the base of that ledge. When they returned to the plateau, Lieutenant Coleman and Bromley were tired, and soaked with the rain, and crushed with the awful certainty that Philip had fallen over the great rock face into the Cove. They could neither eat nor sleep as long as there was a possibility of discovering any clue to his fate; and so in time they came to the slippery rock in front of the station, where the heel of his boot or the sharp edge of the telescope had made a scratch on the stone that the rain was powerless to wash out. It was no use to call his name after that dreadful plunge, the very thought of which tied their tongues to that extent that the two men stood in silence over their discovery; and when they could learn no more they came away hand in hand, without uttering a word. This was indeed the point where Philip had gone over the great rock; but by a strange good fortune his body had plunged into a mass of rotten snow fifty feet from the brink of the precipice. It was the snow of the avalanche making ready to fall; and through this first bank his body broke its way, falling from point to point for another fifty feet, until he lay unconscious over the roots of the great icicles which hung free from the rounded ledge below him, dripping their substance nine hundred feet into the Cove.