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 From where he stood he could not see the bridge that spanned the inner stream, but by now Marthe Ludérac must have crossed it and he descended to the meadow. If she were coming towards the island, he would meet her; if she was picketing her goat on the lower ground, he would join her. This was what Jill had asked him to do. He had demurred; but it was her wish.

As he rounded the promontory he saw her at some little distance before him, and, keeping close to the inner stream, he followed her. The stream, under the vast, looming curve of the cliff, was dark and still. He glanced down at it as he went and saw a sharp edge of blue reflected, deep down, and the far, high beak of the promontory cutting into it; and for a moment it made him dizzy and a little sick to see the inverted height.—Now she had put down the kid and it trotted nimbly yet unsteadily beside its bleating mother. The mother's cry came loudly, shaken by the wind and strangely echoing back from the rocky heights; a cry like the day, Graham felt—full of anxiety, anticipation, and brooding love.

Marthe Ludérac was approaching a little cabin at the furthest end of the meadow. Set small and low on its narrow strip of sunlit meadow between the poplar groves and the gigantic, looming cliff, it made him think of a cabin seen in a dream; the whole picture there before him, of which, with hallucinated vividness, he was suddenly aware, was like a dream, and its very colour seemed part of the fabric of his brain;