And he did not care to speak with her now. He had left the pavilion because of his desire to be alone, and that desire still persisted. However, she was some little distance ahead of him and he waited in the edge of the grove until she should go over the crest of the little hill at the next point.
But she did not go over the crest. Instead, when she reached it, she walked to the very edge of the bluff and stood there looking off at the ocean. The sea breeze ruffled her hair and blew her skirts about her and she made a pretty picture. But to Albert it seemed that she was standing much too near the edge. She could not see it, of course, but from where he stood he could see that the bank at that point was much undercut by the winter rains and winds, and although the sod looked firm enough from above, in reality there was little to support it. Her standing there made him a trifle uneasy and he had a mind to shout and warn her. He hesitated, however, and as he watched she stepped back of her own accord. He turned, re-entered the grove and started to walk back to the pavilion.
He had scarcely done so when he heard a short scream followed by a thump and a rumbling, rattling sound. He turned like a flash, his heart pounding violently.
The bluff edge was untenanted. A semi-circular section of the sod where Helen had stood was missing. From the torn opening where it had been rose a yellow cloud of dust.
A goodly number of the South Harniss “natives,” those who had not seen him play tennis, would have been willing to swear that running was, for Albert Speranza, an impossibility. His usual gait was a rather languid saunter. They would have changed their minds had they seen him now.
He ran along that path as he had run in school at the last track meet, where he had been second in the hundred-yard dash. He reached the spot where the sod had broken and, dropping on his knees, looked fearfully over. The dust was still rising, the sand and pebbles were still rattling in a diminishing shower down to the beach so far below. But he did not see what he had so feared to see.
What he did see, however, was neither pleasant nor altogether reassuring. The bluff below the sod at its top dropped sheer and undercut for perhaps ten feet. Then the sand and clay sloped outward and the slope extended down for another fifty feet, its surface broken by occasional clinging chunks of beach grass. Then it broke sharply again, a straight drop of eighty feet to the mounds and dunes bordering the beach.