o the mill.

But, as he grasped the open fence, all power of action left him, and he
stood, as if paralysed, staring at that which had caught his eye.

There, far away toward the mill, dwarfed by distance, but clearly seen
in the bright morning air, a figure had started up, run for a few yards
along the bank, and suddenly plunged in the flooded river. Jerry saw
the splashed water glitter in the sunshine and then, indistinctly, a
head reappear and remain in sight for some few minutes as its owner
floated or swam. Then a curve of the river hid it from his sight, and
he recovered his power of action again. Climbing the rail, he scrambled
down the side of the raised roadway, reached the bank, and started
running.

It was a mile to the mill, and in how many minutes Jerry covered the
distance he never knew, but he pulled up short in the mill-yard, to find
that he could go no farther; for the waters were well out beyond, and
went swinging round a curve at a terrific rate, the river being narrowed
here by the piers, buttresses, and piles upon which the mill-buildings
had been reared. The tops of the pier-piles showed in two places, but
that was all, and, though he climbed up the ladder leading to a whitened
door in the side of the building, he could see nothing but the waste of
hurrying water gleaming in the sunshine, and felt that the building was
quivering from the pressure of the flood.

Jerry clung to the handle of the door at the top of the steps, and the
flour came off white upon his Oxford mixture coat as he turned dizzy and
sick in his hurry and despair, for he knew that the figure he had seen
must be that of Richard Frayne, and he had come too late!

"He must have seen me," groaned Jerry; "and just as he was a-hesitating
he thought I'd come to drag him back, and he went in. Nothing couldn't
save him, and I seem to have drove him to his end."

In his own mind he wanted no endorsement of the correctness of his idea.
He had been sure that Richard had taken this route when he started from
the house; he had seen him; and it was all over.

But the endorsement came, for just then, heard above the rushing of the
river along the back-water and beneath the mill, where the huge
revolving wheel worked, came a loud "Ahoy!"

Turning quickly, Jerry saw, from his coign of vantage, the white figure
of the miller coming quickly down the road, waving his arms as if he had
once owned a wind-mill instead of a water-mill, and w