e set her face determinedly against the erosive
impatience of despair. There was nothing to do but to wait with what
fortitude she could muster.

The afternoon dragged on interminably, and to make the prospect more
dispiriting the sky clouded over and the sun disappeared. Toward
evening Prime began to stir restlessly and to mutter in a sort of feeble
delirium. The young woman hailed this as a hopeful symptom, and yet the
mutterings of the unconscious man were inexpressibly terrifying. What if
the recovery should be only of the body and not of the mind?

As the dusk began to gather, Lucetta found her strong resolution ebbing
in spite of all she could do. The thunder of the near-by cataract
deafened her, and the darkling shadows of the forest were thickly shot
with unnerving suggestions. To add the finishing touch, her mind
constantly reverted to the story of the finding and disposal of the two
dead men and she could not drive the thought away. In a short time it
became a frenzied obsession, and she found herself staring wildly in a
sort of hypnotic trance at the waterfall, fully expecting to see one or
both of the dead bodies come catapulting over it.

While it was still light enough to enable her to distinguish things
dimly, something did come over the fall, a shapeless object about the
size of a human body, shooting clear of the curving water wall, to drop
with a sullen splash into the whirlpool. Lucetta covered her eyes with
her hands and shrieked. It was the final straw, and she made sure her
sanity was going.

She was still gasping and trembling when she heard a voice, and
venturing to look she saw that Prime was sitting up and holding his head
in his hands. The revulsion from mad terror to returning sanity was so
sudden and overpowering that she wanted to go to him and fall on her
knees and hug him merely because he was a man and alive, and hadn't died
to leave her alone with the frightful horrors.

"Didn't I--didn't I hear you scream?" he mumbled, twisting his tongue to
the words with the utmost difficulty. And then: "What on earth has
happened to me? I feel--as if--I had been run through--a
threshing-machine."

"You were pitched out of the canoe and hurt," she told him. "I--I was
afraid you were going to die!"

"Was that why you screamed?" The words were still foolishly hard to
find and still harder to set in order.

At this she cried out again, and again covered her eyes. "No--no! It is
there yet--in t