e, not entirely, but enough to make him right himself with
care and sit down again, realising for the time being that it was she
who was mistress of this question--who should be thrown out of the boat
and drowned.

"Of course I'll row you to The Mills, if it's to jail you want to go;
but Walker is pretty bad, they say. I think it'll be murder they'll
bring you up for; and it ain't no sort of use trying to prove that you
didn't do it!"

The miserable man put his dirty knotted hands before his face and howled
again. But even that involuntary sound was furtive lest any one should
hear. He might have shrieked and roared with all the strength that was
in him--there was no human ear within reach--but the instinct of
cowardice kept him from making any more noise than was necessary to rend
and break the heart of the woman beside him,--that, although he was only
half conscious of it, was his purpose in crying. He had a fiendish
desire to make her suffer for bringing him such news.

Ann was not given to feeling for others, yet now it was intense
suffering to her to see him shaking, writhing, moving like a beast in
pain. She did not think of it as her suffering; she transferred it all
to him, and supposed that it was the realisation of his misery that she
experienced.

At last she said: "There's one fellow up to the falls that knows a track
through the north of the marsh to sound ground; I heard him tell it one
day how he'd found it out. It's that David Brown that's been coming
round to see Christa. Christa can get the chart he made from him by
to-morrow night--I know she can. I'll try to be here earlier than I was
to-night. And I brought you strips of stuff, father, so that you could
tie yourself on to the tree and have a sort of a sleep; and I brought a
few drops of morphia, just enough to make you feel sleepy and stupid,
and make the time pass a bit quicker."

For a long while he writhed and cried, telling her that it took all the
wits that he had to keep awake enough to keep the devils off him without
taking stuff to make him sleep, and that he was sure she'd never come
back, and that he would very likely be left on the tree to rot or to
fall into the water.

All that he said came so near to being true that it caused her the
utmost pain to hear it. He was clever enough by instinct, not by
thought, to know that mere idle cries could not torture her as did the
true picture of the fears and dangers that encompassed him in