reluctantly, even resentfully.

"Don't!" she entreated like a child. "I am so tired. Let me sleep."

"My poor dear, I know all about it," a motherly voice made answer.
"But it's time for you to wake."

She did not grasp the words--only, very vaguely, their meaning; and
this she made a determined, but quite fruitless, effort to defy. In
the end, being roused in spite of herself, she opened her eyes and
gazed upwards.

And all his life long Nick Ratcliffe remembered the reproach that
those eyes held for him. It was as if he had laid violent hands upon a
spirit that yearned towards freedom, and had dragged it back into the
sordid captivity from which it had so nearly escaped.

But it was only for a moment that she looked at him so. The reproach
faded swiftly from the dark eyes and he saw a startled horror dawn
behind it.

Suddenly she raised herself with a faint cry. "Where am I?" she
gasped. "What--what have you done with me?"

She stared around her wildly, with unreasoning, nightmare terror. She
was lying on a bed of fern in a narrow, dark ravine. The place was
full of shadow, though far overhead she saw the light of day. At one
end, only a few yards from her, a stream rushed and gurgled among
great boulders, and its insistent murmur filled the air. Behind her
rose a great wall of grey rock, clothed here and there with some dark