From far above, from some indefinite, hidden opening; the light from the big outdoors filtered down upon her. There was a brooding dusk here made vibrant with the clamouring voice that was no longer like distant thunder but resolved itself into the echoing fall of water. Water that came from the darkness above, that flashed a few feet through the dim light, that leaped out and plunged into the darkness again, shouting and thundering as it dropped into a yawning ink black void rimmed with granite boulders. She crept closer, her ears filled with the din, her eyes bright with the strange, weird, almost unearthly beauty of the place. She crept so close, gripping one of the boulders with tightening fingers, that she could peer downward into the chasm that swallowed the water. It was only a small stream, such as is born in the High Sierra of melting snows, but its dizzy fall, its mad leaping, the echoes that were never still, caused a murmurous sound that swelled and lessened fitfully but was never still. She found a loose stone and pushed it over the edge, leaning forward swiftly to listen, seeking to trust to her ears since her eyes could tell her nothing of the depth that lay below. She heard the stone strike, clatter against the rocky sides, strike again and again, the sound growing fainter until at last it was lost altogether in the noise of the water. She stood up, drew back and looked across the chasm which lay like a gash upon the rocky floor. She judged it to be fifteen feet wide, maybe wider; upon the far side and perhaps fifty feet further back, there was a splotch of light indicating a way out there into the open day. But the bottomless abyss shut off all passage to the other side, its echoes growling threateningly as though they were what they seemed to the girl's quickened fancies, the restless mutterings of giant things imprisoned in the deepest bowels of the earth. "If I ever wanted to run away from all the world," she mused fantastically, "I'd come here!" And then, suddenly shuddering, she went back hurriedly to the open. CHAPTER XII THE TALES OF MR. WILLIE DART Being a girl very much in love, her lover had been already as long out of her thoughts as he could ever be, and now he came back into them and became the centre of them.