the boat, the young man
stripped off his jacket and, regardless of her vaguely expressed protest,
wrapped it round her feet. It held the living warmth of his body; and,
chilled, dazed, and spent, as Damaris was, that warmth curiously soothed
her, until the ink-black boat floating upon the brimming, hardly less
inky, water faded from her knowledge and sight. She drooped together,
passing into a state more comparable to coma than to natural slumber, her
will in abeyance, thought and imagination borne under by the immensity of
her fatigue.

As Faircloth, meanwhile, pulled clear of the outstanding piles of the
jetty, he heard voices and saw lights moving down by the ferry on the
opposite shore. But these, and any invitation they might imply, he
ignored. If the hue and cry after Damaris, which he had prophesied, were
already afoot, he intended to keep clear of it, studiously to give it the
slip. To this end, once in the fairway of the river he headed the boat
downstream, rowing strongly though cautiously for some minutes, careful
to avoid all plunge of the oars, all swish of them or drip. Then, the
lights now hidden by the higher level and scrub of the warren, he sat
motionless letting the boat drift on the seaward setting current.

The fine rain fell without sound. It shut out either bank creating a
singular impression of solitude and isolation, and of endlessness too.
There seemed no reason why it should ever cease. And this delusion of
permanence, the enclosing soft-clinging darkness served to heighten. The
passage of time itself seemed arrested--to-morrow becoming an
abstraction, remote and improbable, which could, with impunity, be left
out of the count. With this fantastic state of things, Faircloth had no
quarrel. Though impatient of inaction, as a rule definite and autocratic
enough, he really wasn't aware of having any particular use for
to-morrow. Content still held sway. He was satisfied, profoundly, yet
dreamingly, satisfied by an achievement long proposed, long waited for,
the door upon which had opened to-day by the merest accident--if anything
can justly be called accident, which he inclined to believe it could not.

He had appointed, it should be added, a limit in respect of that
achievement, which he forbade himself to pass; and it was his habit very
rigidly to obey his own orders, however little disposed he might be to
obey those of other people. He had received, as he owned, more than he
could reasonably