t he
had hitherto screened himself.

"Ah!--that's you, you traitor, is it?" cried Yeobright. "Why should
it be she? Because last week she would have put an end to her life if
she had been able. She ought to have been watched! Take one of the
lamps and come with me."

Yeobright seized the one on his side and hastened on; Wildeve did
not wait to unfasten the other, but followed at once along the
meadow-track to the weir, a little in the rear of Clym.

Shadwater Weir had at its foot a large circular pool, fifty feet in
diameter, into which the water flowed through ten huge hatches, raised
and lowered by a winch and cogs in the ordinary manner. The sides of
the pool were of masonry, to prevent the water from washing away the
bank; but the force of the stream in winter was sometimes such as
to undermine the retaining wall and precipitate it into the hole.
Clym reached the hatches, the framework of which was shaken to its
foundations by the velocity of the current. Nothing but the froth of
the waves could be discerned in the pool below. He got upon the plank
bridge over the race, and holding to the rail, that the wind might not
blow him off, crossed to the other side of the river. There he leant
over the wall and lowered the lamp, only to behold the vortex formed
at the curl of the returning current.

Wildeve meanwhile had arrived on the former side, and the light from
Yeobright's lamp shed a flecked and agitated radiance across the
weir pool, revealing to the ex-engineer the tumbling courses of the
currents from the hatches above. Across this gashed and puckered
mirror a dark body was slowly borne by one of the backward currents.

"O, my darling!" exclaimed Wildeve in an agonized voice; and, without
showing sufficient presence of mind even to throw off his greatcoat,
he leaped into the boiling caldron.

Yeobright could now also discern the floating body, though but
indistinctly; and imagining from Wildeve's plunge that there was life
to be saved he was about to leap after. Bethinking himself of a wiser
plan he placed the lamp against a post to make it stand upright, and
running round to the lower part of the pool, where there was no wall,
he sprang in and boldly waded upwards towards the deeper portion.
Here he was taken off his legs, and in swimming was carried round into
the centre of the basin, where he perceived Wildeve struggling.

While these hasty actions were in progress here, Venn and Thomasin had
been toil