asked this in a hasty
whisper. They both spoke as if there was some need for haste.

"Noa. I tied her round with your fish-cord. If yo'd have done that, yo'
might have got the babby the same way I got yo'."

The heart of Caius sank. If only he had done this! Jim Hogan was not a
companion for whom he had any respect; he looked upon him as a person of
low taste and doubtful morals, but in this Jim had shown himself
superior.

"I guess we'd better go and look after them," said Jim. He waded in a
few paces. "Come along," he said.

As they waded round to the inner side of the island, Caius slowly took
off some of his wet clothes and tied them round his neck. Then they swam
back across the channel at its narrowest.

While the water was rushing past their faces, Caius was conscious of
nothing but the animal desire to be on the dry, warm shore again; but
when they touched the bottom and climbed the bank once more to the
place where he had seen the child cast away, he forgot all his fight
with the sea, and thought only with horror of the murder done--or was
there yet hope that by a miracle the child might be found somewhere
alive? It is hope always that causes panic. Caius was panic-stricken.

The woman lay, bound hand and foot, upon the grass.

"If I couldn't ha' tied her," said Jim patronizingly, "I'd a quietened
her by a knock on the head, and gone after the young un, if I'd been
yo'."

The other children had wandered away. They were not to be seen.

Jim knelt down in a business-like way to untie the woman, who seemed now
to be as much stunned by circumstances as if she had been knocked as
just suggested.

A minute more, and Caius found himself running like one mad in the
direction of home. He cared nothing about the mother or the elder
children, or about his own half-dressed condition. The one thought that
excited him was a hope that the sea might have somewhere cast the child
on the shore before she was quite dead.

Running like a savage under the budding trees of the wood and across his
father's fields, he leaped out of the darkness into the heat and
brightness of his mother's kitchen.

Gay rugs lay on the yellow painted floor; the stove glistened with
polish at its every corner. The lamp shone brightly, and in its light
Caius stood breathless, wet, half naked. The picture of his father
looking up from the newspaper, of his mother standing before him in
alarmed surprise, seemed photographed in pain upon his