"Moving as if in obedience to some power external or at least foreign to herself, as a mechanical figure might move, steadily, deliberately, and yet blindly, Kate had advanced directly towards the narrow chasm, and when I first beheld her she already seemed balancing on the brink. Before I could cover half the distance that separated us, she had set foot on the long beam which spanned the abyss, and had begun to walk along it. By the time I reached the hither end, she was halfway over, stepping as unconsciously as if she were on an ordinary sidewalk, though the slightest deflection from a straight course would have sent her down a hundred feet to the jagged boulders below. "Standing on the hither verge, every nerve so tensely strung that I seemed to hear the blood humming through my brain, I watched the passage of those small feet, which I had admired that morning as they peeped coquettishly from beneath her dress in the railway carriage--I watched them pass, step after step, along that awful beam. I suppose the transit must have been accomplished in less than a minute, but it seemed to me that I was watching it for hours. I uttered no sound, lest it might rouse her from her trance and insure the catastrophe that else she might escape; I did not attempt to overtake her, fearful lest the beam should fail to support our united weight. I saw her pass on, rigid, unbending, but sure of foot as a rope-dancer; and at last I saw her reach the opposite side, and stand once more on solid earth, preserved from death as it seemed by a miracle. I have no distinct recollection of how I followed; I only know that a few seconds afterwards I was standing beside her, with my arm round her waist. "I led her forwards a few paces out of sight of the ravine, the mere thought of which now turned me sick, and brought her to a plot of soft turf, beneath a tree with low spreading branches. The trance was evidently passing away; her limbs no longer had that unnatural rigidity; her eyelids drooped heavily, and her jaw relaxed. A violent trembling seized upon her; she sank down on the turf as if all power of self-support had gone out of her. At that moment I fancied I heard a slight crackle among the shrubbery not far off; I looked quickly up, and saw--or thought I saw--a short ungainly figure obscurely stealing away through the underbush. Almost immediately he vanished amidst the trees, leaving me in doubt whether my eyesight had not after all played me false. "As I turned again to Kate, she was sitting up against the trunk of the tree, the diamonds flashing at her throat and ears, and a puzzled questioning expression on her face. "'What makes you look so strange?' she murmured. 'Where is your hat! How did we come here, Tom? I thought----'