"How came you here?" was all that he could find words for. "You! And here!"
She would tell him everything! But he must not tarry down there. He must make haste---Her words cleared his bewilderment away; he glanced again over his shoulder. The gorge was empty of other human presence. He looked back up at her. And then, before her eager eyes, he slumped down where he stood, lying in the snow.
"I can't." She heard his voice as across a distance ten times that which separated them. In it was bleak despair. "I've gone through hell already. I am--nearly dead. I couldn't climb up there. I----Oh, my God, why did I ever come into this inferno!"
She begged, she urged. But he only turned a white face up to her and lay where he had fallen, his body shaking visibly, what with the strain he had put upon it and the emotions which only his own soul knew.
"But it is so easy," she cried to him, forgetful of her now terror at mounting up here. "I have done it. Twice. I will show you just which way, where to set your feet."
"I can't," he said miserably. "It was all I could do to get this far. I--I think I am dying----"
Again and again she pleaded with him. But he had either reached the limit of his physical endurance or, shaken and unnerved, he had not the courage to attempt the steep climb. He lay still; his eyes were shut, and to Gloria, too, came the swift fear that the man might be dying.
"I am coming to you!" she called.
She began making the hazardous descent. She did not take time to ask herself if she could make it; she knew only that she must. She set foot on the narrow, sloping ledge outside, brushing off the snow with her boot, clinging with her hands to a splinter of granite, feeling her way cautiously, careful to move inch by inch along the way down which she had gone twice with Mark King. Her fingers, already cold when she started, went numb; they were at all times either in pits and pockets of snow or gripping the rough stone that was ice-cold. Painfully but steadily she climbed down and down. She strove not to look down; she had no eyes for Gratton, who now sat upright, his jaw still sagging, and marvelled at her. A dozen times he was prepared to see her slip and fall.
After a weary time she came to the base of the cliffs. Gratton was not a dozen paces from her. He looked to her like a sick man, gaunt, hollow-eyed; unkempt, unshaven, as she had never seen him before, he was like some caricature of the immaculate Gratton of San Francisco. He did not move but looked at her in a strange, bewildered fashion. Plainly he had had no knowledge of her being here; he could not explain her presence; he was every whit as dumbfounded as he would have been had she dropped down upon him out of the sky. Seeing that he made no attempt to move, she started to come to him. She was standing upon a rock; she stepped off into the snow, and in a flash had sunk to her breast. A cry broke from her as thus, for the first time in her life, she learned what it was to seek to force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow. Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with every effort, at last reached his side.