oung
Ben Tracy was on the pier. Call him in. It is something to know that
what has happened was on the pier. While young Ben is hunted up the
opportunity is taken to make the change of wet clothes for
extemporised dry ones. The half-drowned, all-chilled, and bewildered
man is reviving, and can help, though rigidly and with difficulty.
Then Ben is brought in, appalled and breathless.

The red-eyed and tear-stained boy is in bad trim for giving evidence,
but under exhortation to speak up and tell the lady he articulates his
story through his sobs. He is young, and can cry. He goes back to the
beginning.

His father told him to run and hunt round for the life-belt, and he
went to left instead of to right, and missed of seeing it. And he
was at the top o' the ladder, shooat'un aloud to his father, and the
gentleman--he nodded towards Fenwick--was walking down below. Then the
young lady came to the top stair of the ladder. The narrator threw all
his powers of description into the simultaneousness of Sally's arrival
at this point and the gentleman walking straight over the pier-edge.
"And then the young lady she threw away her hat, and come runnin'
down, runnin' down, and threw away her cloak, she _did_, and stra'at
she went for t' wa'ater!" Young Benjamin's story and his control over
his sobs come to an end at the same time, and his father, just
arrived, takes up the tale.

"I saw there was mishap in it," he says, "by the manner of my young
lad with the lady's hat, and I went direct for the life-belt, for
I'm no swimmer myself. Tom, man, tell the lady I'm no swimmer...."
Tom nodded assent, "... or I might have tried my luck. It was a bad
business that the life-belt was well away at the far end, and I had no
chance to handle it in time. It was the run of the tide took them out
beyond the length of the line, and I was bound to make the best throw
I could, and signal to shore for a boat." He was going to tell how the
only little boat at the pier-end had got water-logged in the night,
when Rosalind interrupted him.

"Did you see them both in the water?"

"Plain. The young lady swimming behind and keeping the gentleman's
head above the water. I could hear her laughing like, and talking.
Then I sent the belt out, nigh half-way, and she saw it and swam
for it. Then I followed my young lad for to get out a shore-boat."

It was the thought of the merpussy laughing like and talking in the
cruel sea that was to engulf her that