ould come to take her from him; but the habit of
the oppressor was on him, and of the oppressed on her. And when this
has been many years established, it is hard for either to realize that,
to escape, the oppressed has only to open the door and go.

Yet Helen, if she had ever thought of escape into another world and
life, would not have desired it. For in leaving her millstones she
would have lost a world whose boundaries she had never touched, and a
life whose sweetness she had never exhausted. And she would have lost
her clue to knowledge of him who was to her always the boy in the old
jersey who had knocked at her door so many years ago.

Once he was shipwrecked...

...The waters had sucked her under twice already, when her helpless
hands hit against some floating substance on the waves. She could not
have grasped it by herself, for her strength was gone; but a hand
gripped her in the darkness, and dragged her, almost insensible, to
safety. For a long while she lay inert across the knees of her rescuer.
Consciousness was at its very boundary. She knew that in some dim
distance strong hands were chafing a wet and frozen body...but whose
hands?...whose body?...Presently it was lifted to the shelter of strong
arms; and now she was conscious of her own heart-beats, but it was like
a heart beating in air, not in a body. Then warmth and breath began to
fall like garments about this bodiless heart, and they were indeed not
her own warmth and breath, but these things given to her by
another--the warmth was that of his own body where he had laid her cold
hands and breast to take what heat there was in him, and the breath was
of his own lungs, putting life into hers through their two
mouths....She opened her eyes. It was dark. The darkness she had come
out of was bright beside this pitchy night, and her struggle back to
life less painful than the fierce labor of the wind and waves. Their
frail precarious craft was in ceaseless peril. His left arm held her
like a vice, but for greater safety he had bound a rope round their two
bodies and the small mast of their craft. With his right arm he clasped
the mast low down, and his right hand came round to grip her shaking
knees. In this close hold she lay a long while without speaking. Then
she said faintly:

"Is it my boy?"

"Yes, child. Didn't you know?"

"I wanted to hear you say it. How long have you been in danger?"

"I don't know. Some hours. I thought you would never