“I’m so unlucky,” Mrs. Maurier moaned, “things—things happen to me, you see,” she explained, haunted with that vision of a pale implacability of water, and sodden pants, and a red beard straying amid the slanting green regions of the sea in a dreadful simulation of life.
“Aw, shucks,” the niece protested, “ugly like he is, and so full of himself. . . . He’s got too many good reasons for getting drowned. It’s the ones that don’t have any excuse for it that get drowned and run down by taxis and things.”
“But you never can tell what people will do,” Mrs. Maurier rejoined, becoming profound through the sheer disintegration of comfortable things. “People will do anything.”
“Well, if he’s drowned, I guess he wanted to be,” the niece said bloodlessly. “He certainly can’t expect us to fool around here waiting for him, anyway. I never heard of anybody fading out without leaving a note of some kind. Did you, Jenny?”
Jenny sat in a soft anticipatory dread. “Did he get drownded?” she asked. “One day at Mandeville, I saw . . . Into Jenny’s heavenly eyes there welled momentarily a selfless emotion, temporarily pure and clean. Mrs. Wiseman looked at her, compelling her with her eyes. She said:
“Oh, forget about Gordon for a while. If he’s drowned (which I don’t believe) he’s drowned; if he isn’t, he’ll show up again, just as Dawson says.”
“That’s what I say,” the niece supported her quickly. “Only he’d better show up soon, if he wants to go back with us. We’ve got to get back home.”
“You have?” her aunt said with heavy astonished irony, “How are you going, pray?”
“Perhaps her brother will make us a boat with his saw,” Mark Frost suggested.
“That’s an idea,” Fairchild agreed. “Say, Josh, haven’t you
