ay assured him, "Nan'll be all right. No one
else would, but she's got nine lives, you know."

Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching
Nan's flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath,
between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the
path, and one would fly off the cliff's edge into space, fall down
perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.

To refuse Nan's lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before
Barry. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman!" Barry had said, coughing
weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea.
That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed
with Gerda.

She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.

"My God!" It was Barry's voice again, from the rear. "Stop, Gerda ... oh,
you little fool.... _Stop_...."

But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in
full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the
path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but
the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.

Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in
her mind as she rushed.

"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."

She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle
bending inward from the cliff's very edge, she did not take. She dashed
on instead, straight into space, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of
the morning through the blue air.

8

Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices
crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the
precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at
the path's side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw
them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side
of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a
tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.

The next turn of the path hid them from sight again. But in two minutes
she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the
path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.

When she reached them they had disentangled Gerda and the bicycle, and
Barry held Gerda in his arms. She was unconscious, and a cut in her head
was bleeding, darkening her yellow hair, trickling over her colourless
face.