every one of them thanked her visibly. His lips
moved to the word 'Elfride,' though the emotion evolved no sound. His
eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole diapason
of eloquence, from lover's deep love to fellow-man's gratitude for a
token of remembrance from one of his kind.

Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She
could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and
not deserted him utterly, and it was much.

It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride
was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird's nest, who
mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance,
thus thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her
face glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.

'How calm he is!' she thought. 'How great and noble he is to be so
calm!' She would have died ten times for him then.

The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
longer.

'How much longer can you wait?' came from her pale lips and along the
wind to his position.

'Four minutes,' said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.

'But with a good hope of being saved?'

'Seven or eight.'

He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and
that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and
flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under the
light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom,
and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a thorough
drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, but Elfride's
seemed to cling to her like a glove.

Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her
hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more particularly
into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending the linen into
strips. These she knotted end to end, and afterwards twisted them like
the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she had formed a perfect
rope by this means, six or seven yards long.

'Can you wait while I bind it?' she said, anxiously extending her gaze
down to him.

'Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of
strength.'

Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow
tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller
scale, and wound the lengthy string she ha