road, shelving beach, backed by lesser
bluffs, to leeward of it. He worked free of the set with a mighty
expenditure of force, nervous and physical, and then for a time, rested,
limiting his exertion strictly to the degree requisite to keep him
afloat, while the waves rocked him landwards with the woman. He found
leisure even to give her a glance to see whether she still lived, was
conscious or comatose.

He found her not only fully aware of her position, but actually swimming
a little--striking out with more freedom than might have been expected,
considering how her arms and shoulders were hampered by the life-ring. A
suspicion crossed his mind that most probably she had been doing as much
for a considerable time, that to her as much as to himself their escape
from the offshore drift had been due. Certainly he could not doubt that
her energies had been subjected to a drain no less severe than he had
suffered. Her face was bloodless to the lips, pale with the pallor of
snow; deep bluish shadows ringed eyes that had darkened strangely, so
that they seemed black rather than violet; her features were so drawn
and pinched that he almost wondered how he could have thought her
beautiful beyond all living women. And her wondrous hair, broken from
its fastenings, undulated about her like a tangled web of sodden
sunbeams.

Three times he essayed to speak before he could wring articulate sounds
from his cracked lips and burning throat.

"You ... all right?"

She replied with as much difficulty:

"Yes ... you may ... let go...."

To relax the swollen fingers that grasped the life-line was pure
torture.

He attempted no further communication. None, indeed, was needed. It was
plain that she understood their situation.

Some minutes passed before he became aware that they were closing in
quickly to the shelving beach--so swiftly, indeed, that there was reason
to believe the onward urge of the waves measurably reenforced by a
shoreward set of current. But if they had managed to escape the greater
fury on the weather side of the point, they had still a strong and angry
surf to reckon with. Only a little way ahead, breakers were flaunting
their white manes, while the thunder of their breaking was as the
thundering of ten thousand hoofs.

Whitaker looked fearfully again at the woman. But she was unquestionably
competent to care for herself. Proof of this he had in the fact that she
had contrived to slip the life-preserver up