up to my breast, and a woman's clothing
seems designed for drowning her. Any other woman than Winifred
_would_ have been drowned, and would have drowned me with her. But in
straits of this kind the only safety lies in courage.

'What a night's adventures!' said Winifred, after we had turned the
Point, and were walking through the shallow water towards the
gangway.

We hurried towards the cottage as fast as our wet clothes would
permit. On reaching it we found the door unlocked, and entered.

'Father has again gone to bed,' said Winifred, 'and left no candle
burning for me.'

And without seeing her face, I knew by the tremor of the hand I
clasped that she was listening with shame for the drunken snore that
she would never hear again.

I lighted a match, which with a candle I found on a chair.

'Your father is no doubt sound asleep,' I said; 'you will scarcely
awake him to-night?'

'Oh dear, no,' said Winifred. 'Good-night. You look quite ill. Ever
since you lifted up your head from my breast, when you were thinking
so hard, you have looked quite ill.'

Suddenly I remembered that I must be up and on the sands betimes in
the morning, to see whether the tide had washed away the fallen earth
so as to expose Wynne's body. To prevent Winifred from seeing the
stolen cross was now the one important thing in the world.

I bade her good-night and walked towards home.

XI

She was right: those few minutes of concentrated agony had in truth
made me ill. My wet clothes clinging round my body began to chill me
now, and as I crept into the house and upstairs to my room, my teeth
were chattering like castanets.

As I threw off my wet clothes and turned into bed, I was partially
forewarned by the throbbing at my temples, the rolling fire at the
back of my eyeballs, the thirst in my parched throat, that some kind
of illness, some kind of fever, was upon me. And no wonder, after
such a night!

In that awful trance, when I had sat with my face buried on
Winifred's breast, not only had the physiognomy of the cove, but
every circumstance of our lives together, been photographed in my
brain in one picture of fire. When, after the concentrated agony of
those first moments of tension, I looked up into Winifred's face, as
though awakening from a dream, my flesh had 'appeared,' she told me,
'grey and wizened, like the flesh of an old man.' The mental and
physical effects of this were now gathering around me and upon me.

From