and to put
him to bed at night and get him up in the morning. They took it in
turns to go to church (did they become suddenly serious, he
wondered, there?), and in turns to air themselves on a certain
little plateau on the cliffside.

He was next to find out that they nursed the monstrous ambition of
urging the bath-chair up the hill and landing it on the plateau.
Gibson was sorry for them, for he knew they could never do it. But
such was their determination that each time he encountered them on
the hill they had struggled a little farther up it.

The road had a sort of hump in it just before it forked off on to
the cliff. That baffled them.

At last, as he himself was returning from the plateau, he came upon
the sisters right in the middle of the rise, locked in deadly combat
with the bath-chair. Pressed against it, shoulder to shoulder, they
resisted its efforts to hurl itself violently backward down the
hill. The General, as he clung to the arms of the chair, preserved
his attitude of superb indifference to the event.

Gibson leaped to their assistance. With a threefold prodigious
effort they topped the rise, and in silence, in a sort of solemn
triumph, the bath-chair was wheeled on to the plateau.

He liked the simplicity with which they accepted his aid, and he
liked the way they thanked him, both sisters becoming very grave all
at once. It was the fair one who spoke. The dark one only bowed and
smiled as he lifted his cap and turned away.

"It's all very well," he heard her saying, "but how are we going to
get him down again?"

How were they?

He hung about the cliffside till the time came for them to return,
when he presented himself as if by accident.

"You must allow me," he said, "to see you safe to the bottom of the
hill."

They allowed him.

"You see" (the General addressed his daughters as they paused
halfway), "we've accomplished it, and no bones are broken."

"Yes," said Gibson, "but isn't the expedition just a little
dangerous?"

"Ah," said the General, "I've risked my life too many times to mind
a little danger now."

Gibson's eyebrows said plainly, "It wasn't _your_ life, old boy, I
was thinking of."

The sisters looked away.

"You must never attempt that again," he said gravely, as he parted
from them at the foot of the hill.

Gibson felt that he had done a good morning's work. He had saved the
lives of the three Richardsons, and he had found out that the fair
one's name was