nt
at its farthest indentation on which they sat.

Yet his watch, on consultation, recorded only five o'clock; and
presently Mr. Wycherley laughed, not very loudly. The two had risen,
and her face was a tiny snowdrift where every touch of rouge and
grease-pencils showed crudely.

"Look now," said Wycherley, "upon what trifles our lives hinge! Last
night I heard you singing, and the song brought back so many things
done long ago, and made me so unhappy that--ridiculous conclusion!--I
forgot to wind my watch. Well! the tide is buffeting at either side of
Carnrick; within the hour this place will be submerged; and, in a
phrase, we are as dead as Hannibal or Hector."

She said, very quiet: "Could you not gain the mainland if you stripped
and swam for it?"

"Why, possibly," the beau conceded. "Meanwhile you would have drowned.
Faith, we had as well make the best of it."

Little Lady Drogheda touched his sleeve, and her hand (as the man
noted) did not shake at all, nor did her delicious piping voice shake
either. "You cannot save me. I know it. I am not frightened. I bid
you save yourself."

"Permit me to assist you to that ledge of rock," Mr. Wycherley
answered, "which is a trifle higher than the beach; and I pray you,
Olivia, do not mar the dignity of these last passages by talking
nonsense."

For he had spied a ledge, not inaccessible, some four feet higher than
the sands, and it offered them at least a respite. And within the
moment they had secured this niggardly concession, intent to die, as
Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a pantry-shelf. The business
smacked of disproportion, he considered, although too well-bred to say
as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth and sea, and
with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose speedier
extinction had been dear at the expense of a shilling's worth of
arsenic!

Then the sun came out, to peep at these trapped, comely people, and
doubtless to get appropriate mirth at the spectacle. He hung low
against the misty sky, a clearly-rounded orb that did not dazzle, but
merely shone with the cold glitter of new snow upon a fair December
day; and for the rest, the rocks, and watery heavens, and all these
treacherous and lapping waves, were very like a crude draught of the
world, dashed off conceivably upon the day before creation.

These arbiters of social London did not speak at all; and the bleak
waters crowded toward them