brought a heart-broken choking
moan from her mother. Then, all being told, the fisher-folk glanced
at each other, and by common consent went noiselessly from the room
and lingered whispering outside. They closed the outer door, leaving
the cottage entirely to Rosalind and her husband, and then they two
were alone in the darkened world; and Conrad Vereker, whom they could
not help, was striving--striving against despair--to bring back life
to Sally.

* * * * *

A terrible strain--an almost killing strain--had been put upon
Fenwick's powers of endurance. Probably the sudden shock of his
immersion, the abrupt suppression of an actual fever almost at the
cost of sanity, had quite as much to do with this as what he was at
first able to grasp of the extent of the disaster. But actual chill
and exposure had contributed their share to the state of semi-collapse
in which Rosalind found him. Had the rower of the cobble turned
in-shore at once, some of this might have been saved; but that would
have been one pair of eyes the fewer, and every boat was wanted. Now
that his powerful constitution had the chance to reassert itself, his
revival went quickly. He was awakening to a world with a black grief
in it; but Rosey was there, and had to be lived for, and think of his
debt to her! Think of the great wrong he did her in that old time that
he had only regained the knowledge of yesterday! Her hand in his gave
him strength to speak, and though his voice was weak it would reach
the head that rested on his bosom.

"I can tell you now, darling, what I remember. I went off feverish
in the night after you left me, and I suppose my brain gave way, in
a sense. I went out early to shake it off, and a sort of delusion
completely got the better of me. I fancied I was back at Bombay, going
on the boat for Australia, and I just stepped off the pier-edge. Our
darling must have been there. Oh, Sally, Sally!..." He had to pause
and wait.

"Hope is not all dead--not yet, not yet!" Rosalind's voice seemed
to plead against despair.

"I know, Rosey dearest--not yet. I heard her voice ... oh, her
voice!... call to me to be still, and she would save me. And then
I felt her dear hand ... first my arm, then my head, on each side."
Again his voice was choking, but he recovered. "Then, somehow, the
life-belt was round me--I can't tell how, but she made me hold it so
as to be safe. She was talking and laughing, but I could