She made no reply, but turned to obey. Her knees trembled under her, and she was sick at heart. As she descended, tears came coursing down her cheeks. Tears of vexation and of alarm. How would she feel ever after should an accident occur? The wiping her hands with dew could not brush away responsibility. Jack would not have ventured his life had she not urged him to it. When she had reached the shore she looked up. The White Cliff is composed of a cap of chalk, a hundred feet thick, striated with beds of flint, and this rests on a series of shelving cherty sandstone beds of a tawny hue. The inclination of these gives to the whole headland an appearance of lurching to its fall. Water sinking through the chalk oozes through the sand and dissolves it, undermining the white bed above till masses of chalk that have lost all support hurtle down. But the chalk itself is full of cavosities caused by the soft rock being eaten into by the sea-winds. Consequently the entire mass is in incessant decomposition and is crumbling down. The mist had blown away, and Winefred was able, on looking up, to see the whole cliff towering above her, the white summit caught by the light of the rising sun. Jackdaws, gulls, choughs, alarmed at the sight of a man descending towards their haunts, were wheeling, plunging, screaming. The cord by which Jack was descending appeared to Winefred but as a thread of black horsehair. He had grappled the protuberances of chalk and progressed, creeping downwards and inwards, about the humps and into corrosions wrought by the sea blasts. The surface was not only scooped out, but was also pockmarked, where nodules of flint had dropped away exposing the sockets in which they had lain. So friable was the rock that there was ever present the danger of the flints detaching themselves and raining down on the head of the climber. There were projections on which the foot might rest and to which the fingers might cling, but each projection had to be tested before being used, so deficient in tenacity was the chalk. Winefred could not distinguish the little steel crook employed by Jack, but it served him in good stead; he could dig it into the rock, and by its aid draw himself along. For a moment he disappeared behind a protruding mass, then he re-emerged, creeping like a fly. Now he stood balancing himself on a ledge so narrow as to be imperceptible from below, and seemed to be studying what looked like a smooth wall along which he purposed to advance by clinging. A profile of rock stood out that bore a resemblance to George III. This the climber had to circumvent, but he was slow in accomplishing his work. He penetrated into every recess, searching among the nests of the sea-birds――so it seemed to Winefred, and so only could she account for the delay and his occasional disappearances. Then, if too much cord had been let out, he was constrained to gather it up as he crawled farther till it was again taut.