“We are almost there,” he comforted.  “And—­some day—­you will love this gloomy kloof as I love it, and we will travel it together all the way to the mountains.”

A few minutes later they came to an avalanche of broken sandstone that was heaped half-way up the face of the precipitous wall, and up this climbed until they came to a level shelf of rock, and back of this was a great depression in the rock, forty feet deep and half as wide, with a floor as level as a table and covered with soft white sand.  Mary would never forget her first glimpse of this place; it was unreal, strange, as if a band of outlaw fairies had brought the white sand for a carpet, and had made this their hiding-place, where wind and rain and snow could never blow.  And up the face of the cavern, as if to make her thought more real, led a ragged fissure which it seemed to her only fairies’ feet could travel, and which ended at the level of the plain.  So they were tundra fairies, coming down from flowers and sunlight through that fissure, and it was from the evil spirits in the kloof itself that they must have hidden themselves.  Something in the humor and gentle thought of it all made her smile at Alan.  But his face had turned suddenly grim, and she looked up the kloof, where they had traveled through danger and come to safety.  And then she saw that which froze all thought of fairies out of her heart.

Men were coming through the chaos and upheaval of rock.  There were many of them, appearing out of the darker neck of the gorge into the clearer light, and at their head was a man upon whom Mary’s eyes fixed themselves in horror.  White-faced she looked at Alan.  He had guessed the truth.

“That man in front?” he asked.

She nodded.  “Yes.”

“Is John Graham.”

He heard the words choking in her throat.

“Yes, John Graham.”

He swung his rifle slowly, his eyes burning with a steely fire.

“I think,” he said, “that from here I can easily kill him!”

Her hand touched his arm; she was looking into his eyes.  Fear had gone out of them, and in its place was a soft and gentle radiance, a prayer to him.

“I am thinking of tomorrow—­the next day—­the years and years to come, with you,” she whispered.  “Alan, you can’t kill John Graham—­not until God shows us it is the only thing left for us to do.  You can’t—­”

The crash of a rifle between the rock walls interrupted her.  The snarl of a bullet followed the shot.  She heard it strike, and her heart stopped beating, and the rigidity of death came into her limbs and body as she saw the swift and terrible change in the stricken face of the man she loved.  He tried to smile at her, even as a red blot came where the streak of gray in his hair touched his forehead.  And then he crumpled down at her feet, and his rifle rattled against the rocks.

She knew it was death.  Something seemed to burst in her head and fill her brain with the roar of a flood.  She screamed.  Even the men below hesitated and their hearts jumped with a new sensation as the terrible cry of a woman rang between the rock walls of the chasm.  And following the cry a voice came down to them.