She drew down her right hand, and still leaning against the wall felt about with her other foot for a support.

She soon found it, a little farther back it seemed than the first foothold; but more experimental investigation showed that it was really part of the same object. There appeared, indeed, to be several of them about, all near to the wall, so that it was plain that poor Julia, as she shot over the brink, had fallen outside, and beyond them. What the bars were that she seemed to be standing on, Juliet could not at first imagine, and it was not till Mark, growing tired of waiting for a splash that never came, reached the conclusion that his ears had deceived him, and took himself and Julia's lantern off to other spheres of usefulness, that she perceived that a faint light penetrated into the upper part of the pit. When her eyes had become accustomed to it, she was able to make out that she was perched upon a portion of the roots of a tree, which had grown in through holes in the wall.

Three great roots there were, curling into and across the shaft of the pit and disappearing down into the darkness below, where Juliet did not dare to look.

She managed, with great caution, to stoop down and catch hold of the highest of the roots, and so to settle herself in a fairly comfortable position, sitting on the middle root of the three, with her feet on the lowest, and her back against the top one.