swift
water. The men shouted for her to stop, and pulled with all their
strength. But the woman, taking their calls as a challenge, rowed the
harder, while every awkward pull of the oars carried her nearer the
deadly grip of the current.

Betty Jo, as she reached Brian's side, and saw what was happening on the
river, grasped the man's arm appealingly, with a cry: "Brian! Brian! She
is going into the rapids! She will be carried down to Elbow Rock!"

But Brian Kent, for the moment, was beside himself. All that he had
suffered,--all that the woman out there on the river had cost him in
anguish of soul,--all that she had taken from him of happiness,--came
before him with blinding vividness; and now,--now,--in her drunkenness,
she was making her own way to her own destruction.

"Of course she is!" he shouted, in answer to Betty Jo. "Her friends
yonder are driving her to it! Could anything be more fitting?"

As though grasped by powerful unseen hands beneath the surface, the boat
shot forward. The woman, feeling the sudden pull of the current, stopped
rowing, and looked about as if wondering what had happened. Her friends,
not daring to follow closer to the dangerous water, were pulling madly
for the landing at the foot of the garden. The boat in the middle of the
river moved faster.

"Look, Betty Jo, look!" shouted the man on the porch, madly. "It's got
her now--the river has got her--look!"

With a scream of fear, the woman in the boat dropped her oars, and
grasped the gunwale of the little craft.

Brian Kent laughed.

Betty Jo shrank back from him, her eyes, big with horror, fixed upon
his face. Then, with a quick movement, she sprang toward him again, and,
catching his arm, shook him with all her strength and struck him again
and again with her fist.

"Brian! Brian!" she cried. "You are insane!"

The man looked down at her for an instant with an expression of
bewildered astonishment on his face, as one awakened from a dream. He
raised his hand and drew it across his forehead and eyes.

The boat with the helpless woman was already past the front of the
house.

Betty Jo cried again as if calling the man she loved from a distance:
"Brian! Brian!"

With a sudden movement, the man jerked away from her. The next instant,
he had leaped over the railing of the porch to the ground below and was
running with all his might toward the river, at an angle which would put
him opposite or a little below the boat when he