again the relief of the evening wind; heard again the chat of a group
of English officers who sipped sherry-cobblers at a table a few paces
off. "I always change my mind," said one of them, "backwards and
forwards till the last minute; then I make it the last one." He quite
understood this man's speech, and thought how like himself! For from
the time he left Lahore he, too, had gone backwards and forwards, now
resolving to return, come what might, now telling himself firmly
there was no remedy but in distance apart, and all there might be of
oblivion. Was there not yet time? He could still go back, even now.
But no; the old obduracy was on him. Rosey had deceived him!

Then he seemed to have come again to _his_ last minute. Once he was
fairly on the ship that was even now coaling for her voyage, once the
screw was on the move and the shore-lights vanishing, the die would be
cast. The stars that he and Rosey had seen in that cool English garden
that night he met her first would vanish, too, and a world would be
between them. Still, the hour had not come; it was not too late yet.
But still the inveterate thought came back--she _had_ deceived him.

So his delirium ended as its prototype of over twenty years ago had
ended. He hardened his heart, thrust aside all thought of forgiveness
and repentance, and went resolutely down to the quay, as he thought,
to embark on the little boat for the ship, and so practically put
all thought of hesitation and return out of his mind. This moment was
probably what would have been the crisis of his fever, and it was an
evil hour for him in which the builder of the pier at St. Sennans made
it so like the platform of that experience of long ago. But the boat
that he saw before him as he stepped unhesitatingly over its edge
was only the image of a distempered brain, and in an instant he
was struggling with the cold, dark water. A sudden shock of chill,
an intolerable choking agony of breath involuntarily held, an
instantaneous dissipation of his dream, the natural result of the
shock, and Fenwick knew himself for what he was, and fought the cruel
water in his despair. Even so a drowning man fights who in old
failures to learn swimming has just mastered its barest rudiments.
A vivid pageant rushed across his mind of all the consequences of what
seemed to him now his inevitable death, clearest of all a sad vision
of Sally and Rosalind returning to their home alone--the black dresses
and the si