Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/127

Rh shelving sand up which stole the waves? He knew that the water eddying against friable sandstone strata that came to the surface had eaten them out with the wash, and that the hard flakes of slate and ribs of quartz stood forth, overhanging the cave. Most certainly, therefore, had Judith fallen, her body must be sought on the sea-face of the masking ridge. The smuggler stood at the very point where in the preceding afternoon Jamie and the dog had scrambled up that fin-like blade of rock and disappeared from the astonished gaze of Judith. The moon, smothered behind clouds, and yet, in a measure self-assertive, cast sufficient light down into the cove to glitter on, and transmute into steel, the sea-washed and smoothed, and still wet, ridge, sloping inland as a seawall. As Coppinger stood looking upward he saw in the uncertain light something caught on the fangs of this saw-ridge, moving uneasily this way, then that, something dark, obscuring the glossed surface of the rock, as it might be a mass of gigantic sea tangles.

"Judith!" he cried. "Is that you?" and he plunged through the pool that intervened, and scrambled up the rock.

He caught something. It was cloth. "Judith! Judith!" he almost shrieked in anxiety. That which he had laid hold of yielded, and he gathered to him a garment of some sort, and with it he slid back into the pool, and waded on to the pebbles. Then he examined his capture by the uncertain light, and by feel, and convinced himself that it was a cloak—a cloak with clasp and hood—just such as he had seen Judith wearing when he flashed his lantern over her on the platform at the mouth of the shaft.

He stood for a moment, numbed as though he had been struck on the head with a mallet, and irresolute. He had feared that Judith had fallen over the edge, but he had hoped that it was not so. This discovery seemed to confirm his worst fears.

If the cloak were there—she also would probably be there also, a broken heap. She who had thrown him down and broken him, had been thrown down herself, and broken also—thrown down and broken because she had come to rescue him from danger. Coppinger put his hand to his head. His veins were beating as though they would burst the vessels in his temples, and suffuse