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imperceptible degrees, the day came stealing in the wake of the
moonlight. Eudena's eyes wandered to the cliff brow overhead once, and
then again. Each time the line was sharp and clear against the sky, and
yet she had a dim perception of something lurking there. The red of the
fire grew deeper and deeper, grey scales spread upon it, its vertical
column of smoke became more and more visible, and up and down the gorge
things that had been unseen grew clear in a colourless illumination. She
may have dozed.
Suddenly she started up from her squatting position, erect and alert,
scrutinising the cliff up and down.
She made the faintest sound, and Ugh-lomi too, light-sleeping like an
animal, was instantly awake. He caught up his axe and came noiselessly
to her side.
The light was still dim, the world now all in black and dark grey, and
one sickly star still lingered overhead. The ledge they were on was a
little grassy space, six feet wide, perhaps, and twenty feet long,
sloping outwardly, and with a handful of St. John's wort growing near
the edge. Below it the soft, white rock fell away in a steep slope of
nearly fifty feet to the thick bush of hazel that fringed the river.
Down the river this slope increased, until some way off a thin grass
held its own right up to the crest of the cliff. Overhead, forty or
fifty feet of rock bulged into the great masses characteristic of
chalk, but at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of
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