Suddenly Gundred could bear the ordeal no longer. The matter-of-fact, innocent cheerfulness of it all was too much for her, with her terrible secret foreknowledge. She knew that Heaven had doomed every one of those happy people, so as to make sure of Ivor Restormel. Of course, he alone might fall, or strangle, or have a stone dropped on his head. But, on the whole, it was far more likely, far more in accordance with Scriptural precedent, that guilty and innocent should all perish together. So much the worse for the innocent! Her mystic exaltation did not go the length of protesting against their fatal plan at the eleventh hour, but it was not quite firm and faithful enough to bear the grim spectacle unmoved. She turned hastily and moved away up the empty bed of the stream, leaving Jim and her husband to watch the descent. From the bend in the river-bed she turned to take a last look at her enemy. He was still chattering and smiling with his friends, adapting the rope, adjusting satchels and packages. Kingston was saying something at which they both laughed. Then Gundred, very sick and heavy at heart, in spite of her sense of sacred ecstasy, turned the corner and was out of sight of the pothole. Kingston eyed the narrow gulf of darkness with unspoken dread. Now, at the last moment, he disliked Ivor’s determination to share the descent. He hated the idea of watching the boy disappear into that night below. It seemed too symbolic of that eternal night into which the restored memory must one day pass again. And yet, the granting of his own importunate desire, what had it brought him except the bitterness of a yet fiercer, more insatiable desire? For a while he would even be glad to have rest from his tormenting, baffling intimacy with the secret thing that could never hear the cry of his voice. Let the boy go down, then, into the darkness, carrying with him that wonderful mystical thing that he enshrined. Kingston’s fingers were raw and bleeding, his whole soul broken and agonized with long fruitless plucking and battering at the locked doors of that shrine. Let it go, then, for half an hour, and leave him at peace. As it had returned to him once before, out of the greater darkness of the grave, so, in the course of a few moments, it would come back to light again from the darkness of the pit, and all his torments would be renewed, growing ever keener and fiercer towards the dim end that he dared not try to foresee. The knowledge of doom was black and heavy upon him as he watched the boy preparing for his disappearance, and, in the concentration of his bitter mood, he hardly heard the voice of Jim, now once more raised in eager pleading to be allowed the joy of the descent.