for God's sake help! Scream, Ceddie--scream!
Help! Help!"

And lo! as she called, as if a miracle had been wrought, out of the
darkness an answering voice called back to her, and the wild, swift
notes of a motor horn bleated along the lonely road.

"I'm coming--I--Cleek!" that voice rang out. "Hold your own--hold it to
the last, Miss Lorne, and God help the man who lays a finger on you!"

"Mr. Cleek! Mr. Cleek, oh, thank God!" she flung back with all the
rapture a human voice could contain. "Come on, come on! I've got
him--got that man Merode, and the boy is safe, the boy is safe! Come on!
come on! come on!"

"We're a-comin', miss, you gamble on that--and the lightnin's a fool to
us!" shouted Dollops in reply. "Let her have it, Gov'nor! Bust the
bloomin' tank. Give her her head; give her her feet; give her her
blessed merry-thought if she wants it! Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!"

And then, just then, when she most needed her strength and her courage,
Ailsa's evaporated. The reaction came and with the despairing cries of
Merode and Lanisterre ringing in her ears, she sank back, weak, white,
almost fainting--and, leaning against the side of the archway, began to
laugh and to sob hysterically. Merode seized that one moment and sprang
to the breach.

Realising that the game was all but up, that there was nothing for him
now but to save his own skin if he could, he called out to Lanisterre to
follow him, then plunged into the mill, swung over the lever which
controlled the sluice gates, and, darting out by the back way, fled
across the waste.

But behind him he left a scene of indescribable horror, and the shrill
screaming of a little child told him when that horror began. For as the
sluice gates opened a sullen roar sounded; on one side the diverted
millstream, and on the other the river, rose as two solid walls of
water, rushed forward and--met; and in the twinkling of an eye the old
water-course was one wild, leaping, roaring, gyrating whirlpool of
up-flung froth and twisting waves that bore in their eddying clutch the
battling figure of a drowning child.

Even before he came in sight of it the roaring waters and the fearful
splash of their impact told Cleek what had been done. He could hear
Ailsa's screams; he could hear the boy's feeble cries, and a moment
later, when the whizzing motor panted up through the moonlight and sped
by the broken wall, there was Ailsa, fairly palsied with fright,
clinging weakly to the cr