for a last breath as he shot under. In a green light he was slatted about dreadfully, spinning upright, then horizontal, his useless arms and legs flying wide and shaken. A giant weight, a personal, hateful weight, began pressing on his back, pressing him slowly down into the dark. Acute worry seized him because this thing was unfair—would not give him a chance to get just one more breath—was squeezing him down into a funnel, and he did not think the bore at the end was big enough to let him through. "Why," he thought, "why, this is It! This is dying. What they call Death!—I'm very sorry for them all up there." And then he thought, as suddenly, "Hold on! I can't yet, because before this sort of thing I'm due to come back to the island,—I 've drunk from her spring—Helen—that was the agreement"—But still he was pressed downward, and the pain grew heavy and dull. No one would ever tell her of the cold, the dark, the loneliness. It was all years ago, anyway, and very deep.
Slowly he was rising. "Where next?" he
