ceeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid
an excited crowd, headed by the _baigneur's_ wailing family, they
carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere was certain
life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. Meanwhile no one seemed
to have any common sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed, but
himself. For two hours he stayed on the beach in his dripping
bathing-clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to him:
rubbing, hot bottles, artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too
old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed his
last, amid the wild and passionate grief of wife and children.

Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to the
doctor, to carry one of the _baigneur's_ sobbing grandchildren to its
mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold of him, and he
submitted to be taken home, shivering, and deeply depressed by the
failure of his efforts. A violent gastric and lung chill declared itself
almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill.
Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how
to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. 'I had not
the heart to write even to you,' she wrote to her mother. 'I could think
of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed
eight days, and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and
declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay
here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so
much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey.
He is not fit for it in any way.'

Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity.
Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides,
considering.

'I shall not go on to Scotland,' he said; 'Mrs. Elsmere must not be
left. I will go off there at once.'

In Rose's soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an
instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it was delicate, not
the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be.
And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he
said good-bye was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him
from her belt.

Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetot to
Petites Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A chilly west wind b