The sunlight bathed the stern cliff which yesterday had buffeted back the wind with a roar as fierce as itself; and in the quiet spring-like air the peaceful bleating of sheep was the only sound to be heard on the steep mountain-side.
But Jeffreys did not turn his steps upward.

On the contrary, he kept to the lowest track in the valley, and took the path which led him nearest to the base of that terrible wall of rock.

A hard scramble over the fallen stones brought him to a spot where, looking up, the top of the wall frowned down on him from a sheer height of five hundred feet, while half-way down, like a narrow scratch along the face of the cliff, he could just detect the ledge on which last night they had sat out the storm.
There, among the stones, shattered and cold, lay all that remained of the brave Julius.

His fate must have overtaken him before he had gone twenty yards on his desperate errand, and almost before that final howl reached his master's ears all must have been over.
Jeffreys, as he tenderly lifted his lost friend in his arms, thought bitterly and reproachfully of the dog's strange conduct yesterday--his evident depression and forebodings of evil--the result, no doubt, of illness, but making that last act of self-devotion all the more heroic.
He made a grave there at the base of that grand cliff, and piled up a little cairn to mark the last resting-place of his friend.

Then, truly a mourner, he returned slowly to Wildtree.
At the door he encountered Mrs Rimbolt, who glared at him and swept past.
"How is Percy this morning ?" he inquired.
"No thanks to you, Mr Jeffreys," said the lady, with a double venom in her tones, "he is alive." "His arm, is it-- ?" "Go to your work, sir," said the lady; "I have no wish to speak to you." Jeffreys bowed and retreated.