ried. "Do you hear? Lie quiet and
you are safe! See!" and she held his right hand while Bernel took his
left and the man found himself no longer sinking, and they struck out
for the shingle.

Others of the miners had run down with ropes, but ropes were useless in
that deep gulf. Nance and Bernel were doing the only thing possible, and
Gard saw that they were all right now that the man had ceased to
struggle.

He picked up Bernel's things, and Nance's, with a curious feeling of
delight and a touch of shyness, her sun-bonnet, her little linen jacket,
her woollen skirt, her neat little wooden sabots, and ran swiftly with
them to the shaft at the head of the gulf.

They would make for the adit, he thought, and so gain the shaft and come
up by the ladders, if, indeed, John Thomas was in any state to climb
ladders.

"Bring some brandy," he shouted to one of the men, and ran on. Nance was
more to him than all the miners in Sark, and it was not brandy she would
be wanting, he knew, but her clothes.

And, since a man needs both his hands to go down almost perpendicular
ladders, he left at the top all that she would not instantly need and
took only the little jacket and the woollen skirt. These he rolled into
a bundle as he ran, and gripped in his teeth as he began the descent,
and rejoiced all the way down in this close intimacy with her clothing.
Indeed, on one of the stages, when he stopped for a moment's breathing,
he kissed the little garments devoutly, and then laughed shamefacedly at
himself for his foolishness, and glanced round quickly lest any should
have witnessed it.

So down, down, till he came to the level, and crept along the adit to
the shore.

They had dragged John Thomas up on to the shingle, and he lay there
half-dead and fuller of water than was his custom.

Nance looked up quickly at the sound of Gard's feet, and the paled-brown
of her face flushed red at sight of him, and then a grateful gleam
lighted it as he dropped her things into her hand and bent over John
Thomas, who was showing signs of life in a dazed and water-logged
fashion.

"You did splendidly, you two," he said to Bernel. "It's a grand thing to
save a man's life, even if it's only John Thomas," for John Thomas had
found this land of free spirits too much for him, and had become a
soaker and an indifferent workman.

"He'll be all right after a bit," he added. "I told them to send down
some brandy," at which John Thomas groaned heavi