oily swirl of the Dee rising
beneath them, and knew that there had been a mighty rain upon the hills.

"The Lord save us!" cried Barbara suddenly. "Look!"

She pointed up the long pool of the Black Water. What she saw no man
knows, for Aunt Annie had fainted, and Barbara was never herself after
that hour.

Aunt Annie lay like a log across her thwart. But, with the strength of
another world, Barbara unshipped the oar of her sister and slipped it
upon the thole-pin opposite to her own. Then she turned the head of the
boat up the pool of the Black Watery Something white floated dancingly
alongside, upborne for a moment on the boiling swirls of the rising
water. Barbara dropped her oars, and snatched at it. She held on to some
light wet fabric by one hand; with the other she shook her sister.

"Here's oor wee Gracie," she said: "Ann, help me hame wi' her!"

So they brought her home, and laid her all in dripping white upon her
white bed. Barbara sat at the bed-head and crooned, having lost her
wits. Aunt Annie moved all in a piece, as though she were about to fall
headlong.

"White floo'ers for the angels, where Gracie's ga'en to! Annie, woman,
dinna ye see them by her body--four great angels, at ilka corner yin?"

Barbara's voice rose and fell, wayward and querulous. There was no other
sound in the house, only the water sobbing against the edge of the
ferry-boat.

"And the first is like a lion," she went on, in a more even recitative,
"and the second is like an ox, and the third has a face like a man, and
the fourth is like a flying eagle. An' they're sittin' on ilka bedpost;
and they hae sax wings, that meet owre my Gracie, an' they cry withoot
ceasing, 'Holy! holy! holy! Woe unto him that causeth one of these
little ones to perish! It were better for him that a millstone were
hanged about his neck and he were cast into the deeps o' the Black
Water!'"

But the neighbours paid no attention to her--for, of course, she was
mad.

Then the wise folk came and explained how it had all happened. Here she
had been gathering flowers; here she had slipped; and here, again, she
had fallen. Nothing could be clearer. There were the flowers. There was
the dangerous pool on the Black Water. And there was the body of Grace
Allen, a young thing dead in the flower of her days.

"I see them! I see them!" cried Barbara, fixing her eyes on the bed,
her voice like a shriek; "they are full of eyes, behind and before, and
they see in