ncern for Gerda and Kay. "My word, Nan, you're a
sportsman."

"He does faint sometimes," said Gerda of Kay. "He'll be all right in a
minute."

Kay came to.

"Oh Lord," he said, "that was a bit of a grind." And then, becoming
garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently
swooned, "Couldn't have done it without you, Nan. I'd given myself up for
lost. All my past life went by me in a flash.... I really did think it
was U.P. with me, you know. And it jolly nearly was, for all of us,
wasn't it?... Whose idea was it bathing just here? Yours, Nan. Of course.
It would be. No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to
rescue us all. Oh Lord, the water I've drunk! I do feel rotten."

"We all look pretty rotten, I must say," Nan commented, looking from
Kay's limp greenness to Gerda's shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry,
prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered
knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs
cut by rocks in the sea. "I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of
you from prostration, and all of us from cold. Are we well enough to
scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?"

"We're not well enough for anything," Barry returned. "But we'd better do
it. We don't want to die here, with the sea washing over us in this damp
way."

They climbed weakly up to the top of the rock promontory, and along it
till they dropped down into the little cove. They all felt beaten and
limp, as if they had been playing a violent but not heating game of
football. Even Nan's energy was drained.

Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky
corner, "I suppose, Nan, if it hadn't been for you and Barry, I'd have
drowned."

"Well, I suppose perhaps you would. If you come to think of it, we'd most
of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren't for something--some
chance or other."

Gerda said "Thanks awfully, Nan," in her direct, childlike way, and Nan
turned it off with "You might have thanked me if you _had_ drowned,
seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all. I ought to have known
it wasn't safe for you or Kay."

Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in
that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing
but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville's little
pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda's hand clutched her