Without a word or a sound--her voice had deserted her--she turned precipitately and fled in the opposite direction through the corridor, down a cross-hall, and burst out of a side door upon a porch that was the nearest outlet from the building. This porch was less intended as an exit, however, than an outlook. True, there were steps that led down at one side to the ground, but the descent thence was so steep, so rugged and impracticable, that obviously no scheme of utility had prompted its construction. Jagged outcropping ledges, a chaos of scattered boulders, now and again a precipitous verge showing a vertical section of the denuded strata, all formed a slant so precarious and steep that with the sharp sound of the door, closing on its spring, Bayne looked up from his seat in the swing on the veranda across the ravine in blank amazement to see her there essaying the descent, as if in preference to an exit by the safe and easy method of the winding road at the front of the edifice.
Lillian, still with all the impetus of terror in her muscles, her breath short and fluttering, her eyes distended and unseeing, plunged wildly down the rugged, craggy declivity, painfully aware of his wonder as he gazed from the distance, prefiguring, too, his disapproval. Perhaps this had its unnerving influence, though swift and surefooted ordinarily, her ankle turned amidst the gravel shifting beneath her flying steps, and she sank suddenly to the ground, slipped down a precipitous incline, caught herself, half crouching against a gigantic boulder.
There was no recourse for Bayne. No one else was within view. Though between his teeth he muttered his distaste for the devoir that should bring him to her side, and the solicitude he was constrained to show, he leaped from the veranda and started down the ravine to her assistance, to "make his manners," as he said sarcastically to himself. But when he had come to the little rustic bridge and, glancing up, saw that she had not yet risen, he began to run, and before he reached her, climbing the ascent with athletic agility, he called out to ask if the fall had hurt her.
"I don't know," she faltered, and when he was at her side she looked up at him with a pale and quivering face.