"It's only somebody's heid that the water's torn aff," and put her hand under Tibbie again. In the morning she found it was a drowned hen. At length she saw motion rather than light. The first of the awful dawn was on the yellow flood that filled the floor. There it lay throbbing and swirling. The light grew. She strained her eyes to see Tibbie's face. At last she saw that the water was over her mouth, and that her face was like the face of her father in his coffin. Child as she was, she knew that Tibbie was dead. She tried notwithstanding to lift her head out of the water, but she could not. So she crept from under her, with painful effort, and stood up in the bed. The water almost reached her knees. The table was floating near the bed. She got hold of it, and scrambling on to it, sat with her legs in the water. For another long space, half dead and half asleep, she went floating about, dreaming that she was having a row in the _Bonnie Annie_ with Alec and Curly. In the motions of the water, she had passed close to the window looking down the river, and Truffey had seen her. Wide awake she started from her stupor at the terrible bang with which the door burst open. She thought the cottage was falling, and that her hour was come to follow Tibbie down the dark water. But in shot the sharp prow of the _Bonnie Annie_, and in glided after it the stooping form of Alec Forbes. She gave one wailing cry, and forgot everything. That cry however had not ceased before she was in Alec's arms. In another moment, wrapt in his coat and waistcoat, she was lying in the bottom of the boat. Alec was now as cool as any hero should be, for he was doing his duty, and had told the devil to wait a bit with his damnation. He looked all about for Tibbie, and at length spied her drowned in her bed. "So much the more chance for Annie and me!" he said. "But I wish I had been in time." What was to be done next? Down the river he must go, and they would be upon the bridge in two moments after leaving the cottage.--He must shoot the middle arch, for that was the highest. But if he escaped being dashed against the bridge before he reached the arch, and even had time to get in a straight line for it, the risk was a terrible one, with the water within a few feet of the keystone. But when he shot the _Bonnie Annie_ again through the door of the cottage, neither arch nor bridge was to be seen, and the boat went down the open river like an arrow. CHAPTER LXV. Alec, looking down the river on his way to the cottage, had not seen the wooden bridge floating after him. As he turned to row into the cottage, it went past him. The stone bridge was full of spectators, eagerly watching the boat, for Truffey had spread the rumour of the attempt; while the report of the situation of Tibbie and Annie having reached even the Wan Water, those who had been watching it were now hurrying across to the bridge of the Glamour.