tockings, though gartered, were torn off her in
that fierce struggle.

He had her in his arms, and cried aloud, and sobbed over her, and kissed
her wet cheeks, her lank hair, and her wet clothes, in a wild rapture.
He went on kissing her and sobbing over her so wildly and so long, that
Coventry, who had at first exulted with him at her rescue, began to rage
with jealousy.

"Please remember she is my wife," he shrieked: "don't take advantage of
her condition, villain!"

"Your wife, you scoundrel! You stole her from me once; now come and take
her from me again. Why didn't you save her? She was near to you. You
let her die: she lives by me, and for me, and I for her." With this
he kissed her again, and held her to his bosom. "D'ye see that?--liar!
coward! villain!"

Even across that tremendous body of rushing death, from which neither
was really safe, both rivals' eyes gleamed hate at each other.

The wild beasts that a flood drives together on to some little eminence,
lay down their natures, and the panther crouches and whimpers beside the
antelope; but these were men, and could entertain the fiercest of human
passions in the very jaws of death.

To be sure it was but for a moment; a new danger soon brought them both
to their senses; an elm-tree whirling past grazed Coventry's plane-tree;
it was but a graze, yet it nearly shook him off into the flood, and he
yelled with fear: almost at the same moment a higher wave swept into
Little's room, and the rising water set every thing awash, and burst
over him as he kneeled with grace. He got up, drenched and half-blinded
with the turbid water, and, taking Grace in his arms, waded waist-high
to his bed, and laid her down on it.

It was a moment of despair. Death had entered that chamber in a new,
unforeseen, and inevitable form. The ceiling was low, the water was
rising steadily; the bedstead floated; his chest of drawers floated,
though his rifle and pistols lay on it, and the top drawers were full
of the tools he always had about him: in a few minutes the rising water
must inevitably jam Grace and him against the ceiling, and drown them
like rats in a hole.

Fearful as the situation was, a sickening horror was added to it by
the horrible smell of the water; it had a foul and appalling odor, a
compound of earthiness and putrescence; it smelt like a newly-opened
grave; it paralyzed like a serpent's breath.

Stout as young Little's heart was, it fainted now when he saw