e words parrot fashion and his feet obeyed the
instructions automatically. The thirty paces ended so near the edge of
crumbling rock that it fell away beneath his toe leaving some two
inches over nothing. Had a man walked here without directions, he
certainly would have taken this last step and been hurled into the
space below. It was pitch dark where he stood. He felt along the wall
for the opening which should take him to the left ten paces. The wall,
the path, the depth below the path were all one save to touch alone.
It was as though he himself had been deadened to every sense but this.
During the last few minutes his brain, too, had dulled so that all he
now grasped of the great happy world outside was a vague memory of
blue sky before which a shadowy figure danced like a will-o'-the-wisp.
But still propelled by the last instinct to leave man before the soul,
he put one foot ahead of him, pressed his body flat to the wall, and
drew the other after. As he proceeded thus, counting the steps he
took, he became aware that the air was fresher. Ahead, he saw an
opening which was a little less dark than this which stifled him. It
was light, though he saw it only faintly through blurred eyes. It was
a gray slit coming together at the top. He groped his way almost to
the edge and then to the left he saw a second opening--an opening into
another dark. It was the cave. He staggered the few remaining feet and
fell prone upon its granite floor.

How long he remained so he could not tell. He was not wholly
unconscious, but in a state so bordering upon it that he realized
nothing but the ecstatic relief which came to his aching body. Still
he was able to realize that. Also he knew that he had reached his
journey's end, so far as anything more he could do was concerned. He
would wait--wait as long as possible--cling to the very last second of
life. He must do that for her. That was all that was left.

His slowly fading senses flickered back. He roused himself and sat up.
In the gloom back of him he made out nothing: the opening was becoming
obliterated by the dark without, so that he felt as though in a sealed
box--a coffin almost. He felt an impulse to shout, but his dry lips
choked this back. He could not sit still. He must act in some way. He
rose to his hands and knees and began to grope about without any
definite object. There was something uncanny in the thought that this
silence had not been broken for centuries. He though