her ears, she sank back, weak, white,
almost fainting and, leaning against the side of the archway, began to
laugh and to sob hysterically. Merode seized that one moment and sprang
to the breach.

Realizing that the game was all but up, that there was nothing for him
now but to save his own skin if he could, he called out to Lanisterre to
rip out the sparking plug of the motor and follow him, then plunged into
the mill, swung over the lever which controlled the sluice gates, and,
darting out by the back way, fled across the waste.

But behind him he left a scene of indescribable horror, and the shrill
screaming of a little child told him when that horror began. For as the
sluice gates opened a sullen roar sounded; on one side the diverted
millstream, and on the other the river, rose as two solid walls of
water, rushed forward and--met. In the twinkling of an eye the old
water-course was one wild, leaping, roaring, gyrating whirlpool of
up-flung froth and twisting waves that bore in their eddying clutch the
battling figure of a drowning child.

Even before he came in sight of it the roaring waters and the fearful
splash of their impact told Cleek what had been done. He could hear
Ailsa's screams; he could hear the boy's feeble cries, and a moment
later, when the whizzing motor panted up through the moonlight and sped
by the broken wall, there was Ailsa, fairly palsied with fright,
clinging weakly to the crumbling arch and uttering little sobbing,
wordless, incoherent moans of fright as she stared down into the hell of
waters; and below, in the foam, a little yellow head was spinning round
and round and round, in dizzying circles of torn and leaping waves.

"Heavens, guv'ner!" began Dollops in a voice of appalling despair; but
before he could get beyond that, Cleek's coat was off, Cleek's body had
described a sort of semi-circle, and the child was no longer alone in
the whirlpool!

Battling, struggling, fairly leaping, as a fish leaps in a torrent, one
moment half out of the water, the next wholly submerged, Cleek struck
from eddy to eddy, from circle to circle, until that little yellow head
was within reach, then put forth his hand and gripped it, pulled it to
him, and in another moment he was whirling round and round the
whirlpool's course with the child clutched to him and its wet, white
face gleaming wax-like over the angle of his shoulder.

They had not made the half of the first circle thus before Dollops had