ose from
the marshes. She mounted it, and beheld the unnatural sea on either
hand. Here and there in the desolate water mounds of gray-green grass
lifted themselves like drifting islands. Trees stricken or still in
leaf reared from the unfamiliar element. Many of those which were
leafless had put on a strange greenness, for their boughs dripped with
seaweed. Over the floods, which were littered with such flotsam as she
had seen from her window, flew sea-birds and land-birds, crying and
cheeping. There was no other presence in that desolation except her own.

And then at last her commanded feet stood still, and her will came back
to her. For she saw what she had come to find.

He was hanging, as though it had caught him in a snare, in a tree
standing solitary in the middle of a wide waste of water. He was
hanging there like a dead man. She could distinguish his dark red hair
and his blue jersey.

She paused to think what to do. She couldn't swim. She would not have
hesitated to try; but she wanted to save him. She looked about, and saw
among the bits of stuff washing against the foot of the bank a large
dismembered tree-trunk. It bobbed back and forth among the hollow
reeds. She thought it would serve her if she had an oar. She went in
search of one, and found a broken plank cast up among the tangled
growth of the bank. When she had secured it she fastened one end of her
rope around the stump of an old pollard squatting on the bank like a
sturdy gnome, and the other end she knotted around herself. Then,
gathering all the middle of the rope into a coil, and using her plank
as a prop, she let herself down the bank and slid shuddering into the
water. But she had her tree-trunk now; with some difficulty she
scrambled on to it, and paddled her way into the open water.

It was not really a great distance to his tree, but to her it seemed
immeasurable. She was unskillful, and her awkwardness often put her
into danger. But her will made her do what she otherwise might not have
done; presently she was under the branches of the tree.

She pulled herself up to a limb beside him and looked at him. And it
was not he.

It was not her boy. It was a man, middle-aged, rough and weatherbeaten,
but pallid under his red-and-tan. His hair was grizzled. And his face
was rough with a growth of grizzled hair. His whole body lurched
heavily and helplessly in a fork of the tree, and one arm hung limp.
His eyes were half-shut.

But they w