Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/205

 He ran toward her, and for a few seconds maintained a pace as rapid as the train's. She leaned from the window and seized his uplifted hand.

"Did I get by with it?" she gasped.

"Yes! God bless you!" he cried, and their hands were parted swiftly.

He stood at the end of the platform and waved his white handkerchief to her; but in a moment, as she looked back, his receding figure dwindled and grew tiny, as if he were a mechanical toy at the end of two long, converging horizontal rods—a little doll man, diminishing and waving a doll's white handkerchief. Above him the vast and broken blue landscape climbed into the sky, and a hazy curve of the cliff disclosed the gray monastery set upon its precipice. Thin as a spider's guy lines, the garden railing ran at the edge, and tiny dark figures stood there, the size of exclamation points. "Ah, good-bye!" Claire cried. "Good-bye . . ."

Her mother pulled her back into her seat. "Do you want to get your head taken off?"

"It seems so strange," Claire said, and uselessly applied a soaked handkerchief to her eyes and nose. "It's so strange, Mother. I don't understand it!"

"For heaven's sake, stop crying! It only makes