st the
head-on wind,

"Coming! Coming! Hold on! I'm coming!" till I coughed and strangled
and had to stop.

How I ran! I never did it before and certainly never can again. Rosy's
tracks curved and twisted, and I felt I was losing time, but dared not
risk missing them, for I was coming nearer to that awful voice
steadily, though it echoed so I should have been helpless without any
other guide.

Well, I found them. Roger up to his shoulders in icy water, his head
dropped back, white, on her arm, and she up to her waist on a slippery
ledge under the highest point of the bank--the bank that I blasted
out! She was caught, I could see, on a jagged point by her heavy,
woollen skirt (it was made in London, bless it!) and must have wedged
her foot, besides, in some way, for she had his whole weight; her lips
were blue. She wore a blood-red cape, all merry and Christmas-like
against the white ledges, and her hair streamed in the wind. Her head
was thrown back like a hound's and those blood-curdling screams poured
out of it; her eyes were shut. Now and then Rosy bayed beside her,
scratching at the snow, and where the water was not frozen in the
protected pools it swirled like a mill-race around the nasty, pointed
rocks.

I leaned over the bank and cried that I was there, but she never
stopped--it was terrible. Finally I made a slip-noose and actually
managed to fling it over his head--Roger had taught me to do that at
school, twenty years ago--and that stopped her, hitting against her
cheek, and she opened her eyes.

"Put it under his arms, can you?" I cried, and after several efforts,
for she was nearly frozen stiff, the brave, clever creature did, and
I got it around a tree on the edge. Then I stopped, panting, for I
realised that I could do no more. The run had taken all the strength
out of me--I couldn't have dragged a cat--and she was little more than
a foot below me!

I can't write about it. My arms ache now, just as my infernal
shoulders ached with that paralysing, numb ache then.

"Listen!" I cried, for she had begun to scream again, "listen,
Margarita, or I will beat you! Is he unconscious?"

She nodded.

"Can you hold on five minutes, with his weight gone?"

She blinked in a sort of stupid assent.

"Could you for ten? Are you braced solid?"

Again she blinked, and with an inspiration I plunged my shaking hand
into my great-coat pocket and pulled out a brandy-flask. Miss Jencks
had taken it from the side