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She shivered. The cold was intense. It seeped through her thin woolly and slacks, and she regretted her forgotten mac. That, at least, would have helped keep the cold at bay for a little longer. She already felt numb, her power to think escaping her with the need to keep warm. And she had to think, to keep her wits about her. To extricate herself, she would have to climb down again, and then up. Straight up, not veering to the right as she had done before. Would her foot stand it? The pain seemed almost to have disappeared. She shivered again. Before she dared another climb she must get warm somehow. Frozen hands and feet would not support her, they could not feel for holds on the slippery rock. She gathered herself together and started to jump up and down—and gave an agonised cry as she came down heavily on her damaged ankle.

Pain pierced her—unbearable pain. And on its heels a blanket of darkness descended, and the sound of the waterfall became muted in her ears. She could feel the cold dampness of the rock through the thin wool of her sweater. Why was she lying on the rock? She had got up, once .... Her last conscious thought was of Reeve. She would never see him again. The icy coldness of the rock should have stopped that from hurting, but it seemed to have no power to anaesthetise that kind of pain. He would never know she loved him .....The blanket of darkness folded right round her, and she settled into its embrace with a sigh, letting it blot out the cold, and the noise of the water, and even the thought of Reeve.

Another sound gradually pierced through the noise of the water. It seemed to come from a long way off. The falls seemed louder now, and someone must have taken away the dark blanket, because she became conscious of cold. Freezing cold, that was too intense even for her to shiver. She opened her eyes and gazed outwards, blankly.

'Marion!'

Someone was calling her name. The sound of it echoed even above the roar of the waterfall. Strong, confident— and urgent.

'Marion!'

It was Reeve's voice. She must be dreaming—or lightheaded. But surely it was heat that made people delirious, not cold? She rubbed her eyes, trying to see through the haze that the darkness had left behind. There seemed to be something solid hanging against the white ribbon of the falling water. A disembodied darkness, that descended against the foaming spray, hovering without any kind of support. She watched it come down slowly, with detached interest. Surely only birds could hover? Perhaps it was just a shadow against the falling water. The shadow of an eagle?

'Marion!'

It was no shadow. She tried ineffectively to struggle upright, but the effort defeated her and she slumped back on the rock. It was the eagle himself. Now she knew she was lightheaded. But it did not seem to matter any more. Nothing mattered but that Reeve had come to her. He swung gently towards her and back again, like a pendulum, then he came towards her again and his feet touched the rock on which she lay. He reached out strong hands and grasped a projection, holding himself upright, and with one quick step he stood over her.

The eagle had come home to his eyrie. But not to his mate. More like, she thought confusedly, to his prey. She gazed up at him helplessly, still unable to believe the truth her eyes conveyed. He seemed to have some sort of harness strapped round him; vaguely she noticed one of the heavy buckles shone dully in the shadowed hollow of the cliff. She kept her eyes on the shine, willing it to remain there, not to go away. For what seemed an endless minute Reeve remained upright, staring down at her with his piercing, hooded eyes, then he bent, and she felt his arms go round her, his voice speak to her. He spoke twice before the wonderful truth penetrated her numbed mind. He was not an hallucination, he was real. He was actually there. The cold, and the danger, and the fear paled into insignificance because Reeve was there.

'Are you hurt much?'

'My ankle.' Her face felt so stiff with cold that she could hardly speak.

'Nowhere else?'

She shook her head dumbly. Her head did not count as an injury. Gently he leaned down and eased her up until she rested against his shoulder, then he put his arms under her and lifted her high, away from the cold, damp rock, and his touch galvanised her back to life. The warmth of it flowed through her body, bringing co-ordination back to her frozen limbs, consciousness to her numbed mind.

'Hold me close. Don't let me go,' she heard herself whisper.

'You can't fall, I'm going to strap you to me.' He misunderstood her. 'Put your arms around my neck, and hold on if it'll make you feel any safer.'

She was not afraid of falling. The void she feared was not the edge of the waterfall, but the emptiness of living without Reeve's love. Just the same she put her arms round his neck as he wedged himself back against the rock, and thrust up one foot on the other side, making a knee for her to sit on. The hair on the back of his head, cropped practically short, felt soft against her frozen fingers as she clasped them behind his neck, and she longed to rim her hands through it, to pull his head close down to her own, and feel again the burning pressure of his lips.

But Reeve was not looking at her; his eyes were intent on something else. She heard the clink of metal on metal, felt his hands fumble about her waist, and then something pulled tight round her middle, binding her body close to his; she could feel the muscular hardness of his frame against her.

'There's no need to be afraid, you can't fall now we're strapped together.'

As if she could be afraid with Reeve, she thought with a detached kind of surprise. Her arms stayed round his neck, clinging, longing .... Surely through their tight hold he must feel the message of her heart, sense all the things it tried to say, and could not utter? He gave the webbing straps an experimental tug, gave a small grunt of satisfaction, then wound his own arms about her, and for an instant her heart beat high with a wild hope, but all he said was,

'Willy's going to winch us both up into the helicopter as soon as I give him the signal. Just lie still, you can't fall while I'm holding you,' he repeated his assurance.

So that was how he had managed to appear down the funnel of the fall, apparently without any kind of support. For the first time she noticed the line attached to the bade of his harness. He loosed her for a moment to reach backwards and give it three sharp tugs—his signal to Willy. She stirred uneasily, resenting even the brief loosening of his grip from about her. She wanted both his arms round her, holding her. In the sweet intimacy of their closeness she would tell him she loved him, and then surely all would be well?

'Reeve...

'Don't talk now. Save telling me what happened until later. We're going up.'

'But I want to tell you ....'

She wasn't going to tell him what happened to toss her over the fall. What did that matter? she wondered bemusedly. She had something much more important to say to him. But just as she was about to tell him so, his arm came back round her in a hard, breath-expelling hold. One of his hands pressed her head close against his shoulder, guarding it against the danger of being bumped against the rock as they rose, and at the same time denying her the ability to speak, because her face was pressed against him, and without warning they swung outwards, away from the rocky slab, into nothingness.

She closed her eyes and gave herself up to his arms. She felt his feet fend them off from the rocks on their first pendulum swing, felt the cold wetness of the spray as they closed in on the waterfall, and then out again, steadier now as
Willy
drew them inexorably upwards. The rim of the waterfall appeared above them, then below them, and she opened her eyes on the homely, familiar face of the fellside, with its sheep, and its heather, and its wonderful, everyday normality. Then why could she still feel the spray from the fall? She raised her face from Reeve's shoulder. The wetness came down round them in an endless cascade as they continued to rise towards the hovering machine, and she realised it was raining. The rain forecast by the milkman's gammy leg, and the mares' tails in the sky when she set out on her walk. She began to laugh weakly, and to cry at the same time. And then she remembered Gyp.

'The dog—he mustn't stay on the fell on his own.'

'He isn't on the fell, he's in here, with me.' Willy's friendly arms reached out to support her as the line drew them both up into the warm, safe cabin of the helicopter. His round face, for once minus its usual cheerful grin, anxiously scanned her own.

'What's the damage, Skipper?' he asked Reeve, and his voice was taut with concern.

'Shock, cold, and a badly ricked ankle,' Reeve replied tersely. 'Help unbuckle her, will you? My hands are too cold to work properly.' Was it her imagination, or did the ice reach his voice as well?

'Let me rub the circulation back into yours.' Willy took her two small hands in his much larger, blissfully warm ones. 'It's a good job I'd arranged to pick Reeve up on the hill,' he exclaimed, 'you're like a block of ice! My, but you're going to get a bad dose of hot-aches in these before they're useable again.' He turned her hands palm upwards, preparatory to giving them the promised rub, and gave vent to a low whistle of sympathy. 'You have taken a bad tumble, haven't you?' He held them up for Reeve to see.

'They'll dress them at the hospital, and have a look at her ankle at the same time.'

'I don't want to go to hospital.' From somewhere she found enough energy to protest.

'You haven't got any choice,' he told her curtly, and this time there was no mistaking the coldness of his voice. 'I'm taking you there, whether you want to go or not.'

'Mrs Pugh will wonder where I've got to.'

'She won't. I followed you across the fell, I said we'd probably walk back the long way, and be a bit late.'

'You followed me?'

'It's a good job I did,' he ignored the question in her voice. 'When I was half way up the fell I met Gyp, heading for home and help as fast as his old legs would carry him.' He reached down and fondled the dog's grey muzzle, and incredibly Marion felt a sharp stab of jealousy that he should lavish his affection on the dog when she needed it so much more. 'He kicked up such a fuss, trying to herd me towards the waterfall, that I guessed something was wrong and sent him on ahead. He led me straight to the edge of the fall. Even then I might not have realised where you were, except that your handkerchief had got caught up on the twigs of that bush when you fell over.'

'It was trying to get it back that made me fall in the first place.' Marion spoke without thinking, and she was quite unprepared for the blaze of anger that scorched her as Reeve shouted incredulously,

'Do you mean your handkerchief had blown over the fall, and you actually risked your life to get it back?' She wanted to get it back to checkmate Reeve, but she dared not tell him so in the face of his undisguised fury. 'Have you taken leave of your senses?' he stormed.

'I—it ' She quailed before the anger in his face.

'Not content with creeping out to meet Ben Wade, you had to try to get yourself killed as well!'

'Ben Wade?' What had Ben Wade got to do with it? she wondered, bewildered by the intensity of his attack. 'I wasn't going to meet Ben Wade.'

'Don't lie to me,' he snapped angrily. 'Why else would you walk as far as the waterfall on a wet morning, and without a mac at that, if you weren't in such a hurry to keep an assignation with Ben Wade? I expect you'd arranged between you to set up another protest meeting, the same as the one you organised in the bar-room last night,' he flung at her harshly.

At
least Reeve did not think she had gone courting Ben. It should have given her a small crumb of comfort, but it could not penetrate the shock of his accusing anger. 'Airport coming up.'

Willy's laconic warning cut across the brittle atmosphere between herself and Reeve, and they both turned and automatically looked down. The flying field showed vividly green after the dun-coloured hillside, and the wet tarmac glistened under the rain.

'Put this on,' Reeve commanded her curtly, and handed over a bundle of something darkly coloured. She took it, and saw it was her mac.

'How...?'

'I brought it with me when I came up the hill.'

How had he known where she was going in the first place?

'I heard Gyp give tongue in the walled garden,' he answered her unspoken question, and she remembered the chase after the cat. 'I put two and two together,' he added significantly.

And made five, she thought wearily, but she did not argue with him. What was the use? He believed she had gone to meet Ben Wade, and nothing she could say would be likely to alter his opinion. She shrugged into the mac and started to button it round her, winced as her grazed fingers fumbled on the buttons. Reeve turned to her impatiently and pulled her hands away.

'I'll do it,' he told her curtly, 'your fingers are sore enough, without making them worse.' She desisted, and let them lie limply in her lap while he did up the buttons, all six of them, and seemed to take an endless age over the last one. She could feel his fingers brush her chin, and she lifted her head, trying not to let him touch her, because his touch weakened her resolve, and she was dangerously close to tears as it was.

'You won't be out in the rain for long, but there's no sense in getting any wetter than you already are,' his voice criticised the reason for her being wet at all.

'I'll drop the 'copter as close to the car as I can,' Willy said accommodatingly 'you won't have so far to walk then.' In spite of her distress, Marion had to admire the skill that carefully settled the big machine within a few feet of where the Rover stood waiting for them near the airport building.

'I'll go and open the car, I can come back and see to the rotor afterwards.' Willy took the key from Reeve and jumped out of the machine, eagerly followed by the dog, who sensed the prospect of another ride.

'I can walk that far, it's only a few steps.' Marion stiffened as Reeve leaned towards her.