He felt a chill of horror run through him, for he knew that she would go, if she had not already been, straight up to An Morlock and acquaint Rhoda with the events of the night, no doubt pleasantly dressed up. "She must have seen the Rumseys this morning!" He hesitated for a moment, and then turned to go straight up to An Morlock. "I'll go and tell Penwynn all about it." "Pooh! Absurd," he cried. "What's come to me? Am I to go and deny a scandal before I have been accused by my friends? Ridiculous." Laughing at himself for what he called his folly, he went right off along the cliff, looking with pride at the smoking of the Wheal Carnac chimney shaft, and pausing for a moment or two, with a smile of gratification upon his lips, to watch the busy figures about the buildings and to listen to the rattle and noise of the machinery. Going on, he came to the slope down from the cliff path to the beach, and he could not help a shudder as he saw how dangerous it was even by daylight. "I wonder we did not break our necks," he thought, as he went cautiously down, and then amongst the granite boulders and weed-hung masses to where he had leaped in and swum to poor Madge's help, for there it all was plainly enough--the long spit of rocks running out like a pier, the swirling water, and the waving masses of slimy weed. "It's a good job it was night," he thought. "Hang me, if I shouldn't have hesitated to dive in now." All the same he would not have hesitated a moment; but it was a wild, awesome place, and the chances of a swimmer getting easily ashore, after a dive from the rocks, were not many. He went on picking his way as nearly as he could to follow the steps taken on the previous night towards the farther sloping path, pausing again as he came opposite to the adit of the old mine up on the cliff. It was an ugly, low archway, fringed with ferns, and whose interior was glossy with what looked like green metallic tinsel, but proved to be a dark, glistening, wet lichen or moss. The place, like all others of its kind, had an attraction for Geoffrey, and he went in a short distance to peer forward into the gloom of the narrow passage through the rock, and to listen to the dripping, echoing sounds of the falling water. It was a part of the working of the old mine, and, doubtless, had been driven in first by the adventurers in search of a vein of tin or copper, after striking which they had sunk the perpendicular shaft on the cliff--the one by the path where he had had his encounter with Pengelly; and, by a little calculation, he reckoned that this adit or passage would be about a hundred yards long. "I'll have lights some day, and Pengelly and I will explore it."