approach it, and walked slowly away along the darkening track of
the highroad.

Still I was not quite satisfied. There was something underlying
the charming expression and the fascinating manner which my
instinct felt to be something wrong. As I walked away toward the
opposite end of the bridge, the doubt began to grow on me whether
she had spoken the truth. In leaving the neighborhood of the
river, was she simply trying to get rid of me?

I at once resolved to put this suspicion of her to the test.
Leaving the bridge, I had only to cross the road beyond, and to
enter a plantation on the bank of the river. Here, concealed
behind the first tree which was large enough to hide me, I could
command a view of the bridge, and I could fairly count on
detecting her, if she returned to the river, while there was a
ray of light to see her by. It was not easy walking in the
obscurity of the plantation: I had almost to grope my way to the
nearest tree that suited my purpose.

I had just steadied my foothold on the uneven ground behind the
tree, when the stillness of the twilight hour was suddenly broken
by the distant sound of a voice.

The voice was a woman's. It was not raised to any high pitch; its
accent was the accent of prayer, and the words it uttered were
these:

"Christ, have mercy on me!"

There was silence again. A nameless fear crept over me, as I
looked out on the bridge.

She was standing on the parapet. Before I could move, before I
could cry out, before I could even breathe again freely, she
leaped into the river.

The current ran my way. I could see her, as she rose to the
surface, floating by in the light on the mid-stream. I ran
headlong down the bank. She sank again, in the moment when I
stopped to throw aside my hat and coat and to kick off my shoes.
I was a practiced swimmer. The instant I was in the water my
composure came back to me--I felt like myself again.

The current swept me out into the mid-stream, and greatly
increased the speed at which I swam. I was close behind her when
she rose for the second time--a shadowy thing, just visible a few
inches below the surface of the river. One more stroke, and my
left arm was round her; I had her face out of the water. She was
insensible. I could hold her in the right way to leave me master
of all my movements; I could devote myself, without flurry or
fatigue, to the exertion of taking her back to the shore.

My first attempt satisfied me that there was no reasonable hope,
burdened as I now was, of breasting the strong current running
toward the mid-river from either bank. I tried it on one side,
and I tried it on the other, and gave it up. The one choice left
was to let myself drift with her down the stream. Some fifty
yards lower, the river took a turn round a promontory of land, on
which stood a little inn much frequented by anglers in the
season. As we approached the place, I made another attempt (again
an attempt in vain) to reach the shore. Our last chance now was
to be heard by the people of the inn. I shouted at the full pitch
of my voice as we drifted past. The cry was answered. A man put
off in a boat. In five minutes more I had her safe on the bank
again; and the man and I were carrying her to the inn by the
river-side.

The landlady and her servant-girl were equally willing to be of
service, and equally ignorant of what they were to do.
Fortunately, my medical education made me competent to direct
them. A good fire, warm blankets, hot water in bottles, were all
at my disposal. I showed the women myself how to ply the work of
revival. They persevered, and I persevered; and still there she
lay, in her perfect beauty of form, without a sign of life
perceptible; there she lay, to all outward appearance, dead by
drowning.

A last hope was left--the hope of restoring her (if I could
construct the apparatus in time) by the process called
"artificial respiration." I was just endeavoring to tell the
landlady what I wanted and was just conscious o f a strange
difficulty in expressing myself, when the good woman started
back, and looked at me with a scream of terror.

"Good God, sir, you're bleeding!" she cried. "What's the matter?
Where are you hurt?"

In the moment when she spoke to me I knew what had happened. The
old Indian wound (irritated, doubtless, by the violent exertion
that I had imposed on myself) had opened again. I struggled
against the sudden sense of faintness that seized on me; I tried
to tell the people of the inn what to do. It was useless. I
dropped to my knees; my head sunk on the bosom of the woman
stretched senseless upon the low couch beneath me. The
death-in-life that had got _her_ had got _me_. Lost to the world
about us, we lay, with my blood flowing on her, united in our
deathly trance.

Where were our spirits at that moment? Were they together and


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