ff. He recognized the fact with a rueful grimace.
The long green waves tumbling along the rocks were rising higher every
instant.

With a quick glance around him, the young man sprang for an upstanding
rock, reached it in safety, and paused, keenly studying the black face of
the cliff.

It frowned above him like a rampart, gloomy, terrible, impregnable. He
shrugged his shoulders with another grimace, then, as the foam splashed
up over his feet, leaped lightly onto another rock higher than the first,
whence it was possible to reach a great buttress that jutted outwards
from the cliff itself.

Once upon this, he began to climb diagonally, clambering like a monkey,
availing himself of every inch that offered foothold. A slip would have
meant instant disaster, but this fact did not apparently occur to him, or
if it did he was not dismayed thereby. He even presently, as he
cautiously worked his way upwards, began to hum again in gay snatches the
song that a child's clear eyes had set running in his brain that
afternoon.

It was a progress that waxed more perilous as he proceeded. The waves
dashed themselves to cataracts below him. Return was impossible, and many
would have deemed advance equally so. But he struggled on, maintaining
his zigzag course upwards, with nerve unfailing and spirits unimpaired.

Gulls flew out above his head and circled about him with indignant
protests. He looked somewhat like a gigantic gull himself, his slim white
figure outlined against the darkness of the cliff. He cried back to the
startled birds reassuringly in their own language, but the commotion
continued; and presently, finding precarious foothold on a narrow ledge
halfway up, he stopped to wipe his forehead and laugh with merriment
unfeigned. He was plainly in love with life--one in whose eyes all things
were good, but yet who loved the hazard of them even better.

The ledge did not permit of much comfort. Nevertheless he managed to
turn upon it and to lean back against the cliff, with his brown face to
sky and sea. He even, after a moment, took out a cigarette and lighted
it. The sun shone full in his eyes, and he seemed to revel in it. A
sun-worshipper also, apparently!

He smoked his cigarette to the end very deliberately, flicking the
ash from time to time towards the raging water below. When he had
quite finished, he stretched his arms wide with a gesture of sublime
self-confidence, faced about, and very composedly continued