stood
there, one hand on the tiller, the other in his pocket (I have often
wondered if it was fingering a revolver in there!), his eyes turned
steadily on me. And I began first to beg and entreat him to save me, and
then to shout out and curse him--and at that, and seeing that we were
becoming further and further separated, he deliberately put the yacht
still more before the freshening wind, and went swiftly away, and looked
at me no more.

So he left me to drown.

We had been talking a lot about swimming during the afternoon, and I had
told him that though I had been a swimmer ever since boyhood, I had never
done more than a mile at a stretch, and then only in the river. He knew,
therefore, that he was leaving me a good fourteen miles from land with
not a sail in sight, not a chance of being picked up. Was it likely that
I could make land?--was there ever a probability of anything coming along
that would sight me? There was small likelihood, anyway; the likelihood
was that long before the darkness had come on I should be exhausted,
give up, and go down.

You may conceive with what anger, and with what fierce resentment, I
watched this man and his yacht going fast away from me--and with what
despair too. But even in that moment I was conscious of two facts--I now
knew that yonder was the probable murderer of both Phillips and Crone,
and that he was leaving me to die because I was the one person living who
could throw some light on those matters, and, though I had kept silence
up to then, might be tempted, or induced, or obliged to do so--he would
silence me while he had so good a chance. And the other was, that
although there seemed about as much likelihood of my ever seeing Berwick
again as of being made King of England, I must do my utmost to save my
strength and my life. I had a wealth of incentives--Maisie, my mother,
Mr. Lindsey, youth, the desire to live; and now there was another added
to them--the desire to circumvent that cold-hearted, cruel devil, who, I
was now sure, had all along been up to some desperate game, and to have
my revenge and see justice done on him. I was not going to give in
without making a fight for it.

But it was a poor chance that I had--and I was well aware of it. There
was small prospect of fishing boats or the like coming out that evening;
small likelihood of any coasting steamer sighting a bit of a speck like
me. All the same, I was going to keep my chin up as long as possible, an