the
depths beneath them there came a splash and a long cry.

"Go! go!" Wrayford cried out, feeling blindly for Isabel in the
blackness.

"Oh--" she cried, wrenching herself away from him.

He stood still a moment, as if dazed; then she saw him suddenly plunge
from her side, and heard another splash far down, and a tumult in the
beaten water.

In the darkness she cowered close to the opening, pressing her face
over the edge, and crying out the name of each of the two men in turn.
Suddenly she began to see: the obscurity was less opaque, as if a
faint moon-pallor diluted it. Isabel vaguely discerned the two shapes
struggling in the black pit below her; once she saw the gleam of a face.
She glanced up desperately for some means of rescue, and caught sight
of the oars ranged on brackets against the wall. She snatched down
the nearest, bent over the opening, and pushed the oar down into the
blackness, crying out her husband's name.

The clouds had swallowed the moon again, and she could see nothing below
her; but she still heard the tumult in the beaten water.

"Cobham! Cobham!" she screamed.

As if in answer, she felt a mighty clutch on the oar, a clutch that
strained her arms to the breaking-point as she tried to brace her knees
against the runners of the sliding floor.

"Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!" a voice gasped out from below; and she held
on, with racked muscles, with bleeding palms, with eyes straining from
their sockets, and a heart that tugged at her as the weight was tugging
at the oar.

Suddenly the weight relaxed, and the oar slipped up through her
lacerated hands. She felt a wet body scrambling over the edge of the
opening, and Stilling's voice, raucous and strange, groaned out, close
to her: "God! I thought I was done for."

He staggered to his knees, coughing and sputtering, and the water
dripped on her from his streaming clothes.

She flung herself down, again, straining over the pit. Not a sound came
up from it.

"Austin! Austin! Quick! Another oar!" she shrieked.

Stilling gave a cry. "My God! Was it Austin? What in hell--Another oar?
No, no; untie the skiff, I tell you. But it's no use. Nothing's any use.
I felt him lose hold as I came up."

*****

After that she was conscious of nothing till, hours later, as it
appeared to her, she became dimly aware of her husband's voice, high,
hysterical and important, haranguing a group of scared lantern-struck
faces that had sprung up mysterious