fted her
head on her knees, and so sat.

An awful dreary time followed. The water crept up and up. Tibbie moaned
a little, and then lay silent for a long time, drawing slow and feeble
breaths. Annie was almost dead with cold.

Suddenly in the midst of the darkness Tibbie cried out,

"I see licht! I see licht!"

A strange sound in her throat followed, after which she was quite
still. Annie's mind began to wander. Something struck her gently on the
arm, and kept bobbing against her. She put out her hand to feel what it
was. It was round and soft. She said to herself:

"It's only somebody's heid that the water's torn aff," and put her hand
under Tibbie again.

In the morning she found it was a drowned hen.

At length she saw motion rather than light. The first of the awful dawn
was on the yellow flood that filled the floor. There it lay throbbing
and swirling. The light grew. She strained her eyes to see Tibbie's
face. At last she saw that the water was over her mouth, and that her
face was like the face of her father in his coffin. Child as she was,
she knew that Tibbie was dead. She tried notwithstanding to lift her
head out of the water, but she could not. So she crept from under her,
with painful effort, and stood up in the bed. The water almost reached
her knees. The table was floating near the bed. She got hold of it, and
scrambling on to it, sat with her legs in the water. For another long
space, half dead and half asleep, she went floating about, dreaming
that she was having a row in the _Bonnie Annie_ with Alec and Curly. In
the motions of the water, she had passed close to the window looking
down the river, and Truffey had seen her.

Wide awake she started from her stupor at the terrible bang with which
the door burst open. She thought the cottage was falling, and that her
hour was come to follow Tibbie down the dark water.

But in shot the sharp prow of the _Bonnie Annie_, and in glided after
it the stooping form of Alec Forbes. She gave one wailing cry, and
forgot everything.

That cry however had not ceased before she was in Alec's arms. In
another moment, wrapt in his coat and waistcoat, she was lying in the
bottom of the boat.

Alec was now as cool as any hero should be, for he was doing his duty,
and had told the devil to wait a bit with his damnation. He looked all
about for Tibbie, and at length spied her drowned in her bed.

"So much the more chance for Annie and me!" he said. "But I wish