head. She closed her eyes against the implacable sky, but opened them immediately and struggled to rise. “No, no: I mustn’t stay here. I want to get up again. Help me up.”
He did so, and had to hold her on her feet. “I must go on,” she repeated. “Make me go on, David. I don’t want to die here. Make me go on, I tell you.” Her face was flushed: he could see blood pumping in her throat, and holding her so he knew sharp and utter terror. “What must I do?” she was saying. “You ought to know. Don’t you know what to do? I’m sick, I tell you. They’ve given me hydrophobia or something.”
She closed her eyes and all her muscles relaxed at once and she slipped to the ground and he knelt again beside her in terror and despair. “Raise my head a little,” she muttered and he sat and drew her across his legs and raised her head against his breast, smoothing her damp hair from her forehead. “That’s right.” She opened her eyes. “Cheer up, David. . . . I told you once about looking at me like that.” Then she closed her eyes again.
three o’clock
“If we were only afloat,” Mrs. Maurier moaned for the twelfth time. “They can’t be further than Mandeville: I know they can’t. What will Henry say to me!”
“Why don’t they start her up and try to get off again?” Fairchild asked. “Maybe the sand has settled or something by now,” he added vaguely.
“The captain says they can’t, that we’ll have to wait for the tug. They sent for the tug yesterday, and it hasn’t come yet,” she added in a sort of stubborn astonishment. She rose and went to the rail and stared up the lake toward Mandeville.
“You wouldn’t think it’d take a tug to pull us off,” Fair-
