“There’s a track off here to the coast. Will you ride out there? I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be alone.”
“Of course I will.”
He led the way up a rough incline covered with low ti-tree and broken by small washouts. Then they came out upon the plain where there was a maze of old tracks partly overgrown and often treacherous. They went slowly, for he missed the way every now and then and they had to go back and pick it up again. The air was keen and salty, with a light night wind rustling about the bushes. The sound of the surf advanced and receded as they twisted and turned.
Valerie lost the sense of her own identity, and it was not till Dane pulled his horse up at the head of the ravine, and she saw the dull line of the surf below, that she came back to herself and him.
He had been lost too, groping in a great blankness of pain and despair, but instinctively feeling his way to a little glimmer of light, impulsively following its little flicker, thinking of the moment when he might get to it.
“Shall we go down?” he asked, turning to look at her, as she sat straight and tense on her horse.
“Of course, if you’d like to.”
She wondered if he still had the tent. They trusted to their horses to steer them safely through the Cimmerian darkness of the gully, for they could see nothing till the dull white shadow of the cottages showed through the trees on the open lower level. When they came opposite the Bentons’, which was nearest to the beach, Dane stopped again.
“Would it be too cold for you to sit out a while? I have coats and things in the tent.”
“No, I never catch cold.”
