"If you should pull through and I should n't," said Avery, lifting a gray face,--"I 'm not a swimmer, and you are,--tell her I 'd give my immortal soul if I had n't left her. Tell her--I--God! Romer, she was very sick! She did n't want me to go." "I 've always thought," said the bachelor, "that if _I_ had a wife--a woman like that"-- His face hardened perceptibly, dripping under his sou'wester. "You fellows don't know what you 've got," he added abruptly. He scrambled up the companionway without looking back. Avery followed him abjectly. At this moment the yacht groaned, grated, and keeled suddenly. Water poured over the rail. The deck rang with cries. Avery got up, and held on to something. It proved to be the main-sheet. It ran through his fingers like a saw, and escaped. Confusedly he heard the mate crying:-- "We 've struck, sir! She 's stove in!" "Well," replied the owner coolly, "get the boats over, then." He did not look at his guest. Avery looked at the water. It seemed to leap up after him, hike a beast amused with a ghastly play. Oddly, he recalled at that moment coming in one day--it was after she knew what ailed her--and finding Jean with a book face down on her lap. He picked it up and read, "_The vision of sudden death_." He had laughed at her, and scolded her for filling her mind with such things. "You don't _quite_ understand, dear," she had answered. "Come," said Romer, whose remarkable self-possession somehow increased rather than diminished Avery's alarm, "we have n't as much time to spare as I would like. Hold hard there while Mr. Avery gets aboard!" The tender was prancing like a mustang on a prairie, for there was really a swamping sea. The landsman was clumsy and nervous, missed his footing, and fell. As he went under he cried, in a piercing voice, "_Tell my wife_"-- When the water drove into his throat and lungs, he thought how he had seen her fight for her breath, patiently, hours at a time. She had told him once that it was like drowning. It was two days after this that a man who attracted some attention among the passengers got off the Shore train at the old station in the city. Marshall Avery seemed to himself to see this man as if he saw another person, and felt a curious interest in his appearance and movements. The man was dressed in borrowed clothes that did not fit; his face was haggard and heavily lined; he had no baggage, and showed some excitement of manner, calling several hackmen at once, and berating the one he selected for being too slow. A kind of maniacal hurry possessed him. "Drive for your life!" he said. He did not lean back in the carriage, but sat up straight, as if he could not spare time to be comfortable. When the hack door slammed Avery saw the man no more, but seemed to crouch and crawl so far within his personality that it was impossible to observe the traveler from the outside.