‘Oh, I won’t let you fall! Just come this way a little and you can sit up with the cliff at your back. We’re perfectly safe, but I’m afraid we’ll have to stay here until it’s light. It’s too dark to get back the way I came. I didn’t like to leave.you long enough to go and fetch help – you were in a pretty bad position. And we’ll be all right here until the morning. Perhaps we had better exchange names. I’m Stephen Eversley, and I’m down here on a holiday. I was out watching birds and taking photographs, which is why I had a rope in the boat. I couldn’t have got you up without it. I suppose you are on holiday too. I’m on my own, and no one will bother about me, but your people will get the wind up, so we may have a search party along almost any time.’

It was nice to feel the cliff at her back. The ledge was three or four feet wide and it ran along quite a way, getting narrower until it disappeared. There was room to stretch out her feet. She looked out over the darkening sea and said,

‘Oh, I don’t know. They weren’t getting down til pretty late.’

‘Who weren’t?’

‘The people I was going to stay with, Monica Carson and her mother. We’re at school together, and Mrs. Carson asked me for part of the holidays. My train got in at four, and their’s wasn’t until six, so I was to go to the place where they had booked our rooms – it’s a private hotel called Sea View – and have tea and get unpacked. But when I got there, Mrs. Carson had telephoned to say they were doing some shopping in London and they wouldn’t be down until eight o’clock, so I went for a walk.’

He gave a half laugh.

‘And nobody had ever told you about the tide coming in! You let yourself get caught between the points, and then tried to climb up the cliff. How old are you?’