Drownlands reared himself in his stirrups. He was blinded with blood in his eyes, but he whirled the flail round his head, and beat savagely in all directions. It whistled as it swung, it screamed as it descended. Then a thud, a cry, and indistinctly, through the roar of his pulses in his ears, he heard a crash down the bank, and indistinctly through his suffused eyes he saw a black mass stagger into the river. Gasping for breath, quivering in every nerve, tingling in every vein, as the blood recovered its wonted circulation, Drownlands held his horse motionless, and, gathering his senses, looked before him. There was hardly a flake of steely light in the sky. Clouds had spread over the firmament. What little light there was, lay as a strip on the horizon, like the glaze of white in a dead man's eye. The inky water reflected none of it. For a moment, on the surface, the lantern attached to Runham's stirrup floated and danced, whilst the flame burnt and charred the horn side, then it was drawn under and extinguished. Drownlands leaned forward and stretched his flail to the water; then drew the flapper across the surface where his enemy had sunk, as one who scratches out a score. Then suddenly he was grasped by the foot, and a voice rang in his ears: 'Help! help! Oh, prithee, help!' In his condition of nervous excitation, the touch, the call, so unexpected, wrung from him a scream. It was as though a rude hand had fallen on an exposed nerve. Again a tighter clasp at his foot, again an entreating cry of intenser entreaty: 'Help! Oh, prithee, prithee, help!' CHAPTER VI BETWEEN TWO LIGHTS Zita had run on. Her young heart was full of the agony of distress for her father. He was the one object in the world to whom her heart clung. She had lost her mother early, and had been accordingly brought up by her father, who had been father and mother to her in one. She had no brothers, no sisters. He had been to her father, mother, brothers, and sisters in one. The young heart is full of love. It is of a clinging nature. It may not be disposed to demonstrativeness, but it loves, it clings; and it is in despair when the object to which it has clung, the person it has loved, fails. For some little while, for more than the fortnight of which Zita had spoken, she had observed that her father was ill, that his powers were declining. She had fought against the terrible thought that she would lose him, whenever with a flash of horror it had shot through her brain, had contracted her heart.