They came slowly across the pool in a flock. Every little boy shrieked to every other little boy of his acquaintance to observe how his particular craft was going. The big man alone was perfectly apathetic, though his priceless possession was the first, of course. He began walking slowly round. Half the children were at the landing before him, calling to their boats, and stretching out their hands towards them. The big one touched land. "Not this time," said Colonel Tempest to himself; "next time." How often he had said that already! How often his hand had failed him when the moment which he and that other self had agreed upon had arrived! How often he had gone guiltily back to the rooms to which he had not intended to return, and had lain down once more in the bed which had become an accomplice to the torture of every hour of darkness! Between the horror of returning once again, and the horror of the step into another darkness, his soul oscillated with the feeble violence of despair. He remembered the going back of yesterday. "I will not go back again," he said to himself, with the passion of a spoilt child. "I will not--I will not." "It is time to go home, Master Georgie," said a nursery-maid. "Just once more, Bessie," pleaded the boy. "Just one _single_ once more." "Well, then, it must be the last time, mind," said the good-natured arbiter of fate, turning the perambulator, and pushing it along the edge, while the occupant of the same added to the hilarity of the occasion by beating a much-chewed musical rattle against the wheel. "_The last time._" The chance words seized upon Colonel Tempest's shuddering panic-stricken mind, and held it as in a vice. "Next time," he said over and over again to himself. "Next time shall really be the last time--really the last, the very last." The boats were coming across again, straggling wide of each other; how quick, yet what an eternity in coming! The top-heavy boat with the red sail would be the first. It had been started long before the others. The wind caught it near the edge. It would turn over. No, it righted itself. It neared, it bobbed in the ripple at the brink; it touched. Colonel Tempest's mind had become quite numb. He only knew that for some imperative reason which he had forgotten he must pull the trigger. He half pulled it; then again more decidedly. There was a report. It stunned him back to a kind of consciousness of what he had done, but he felt nothing. There was a great silence, and then a shrieking of terrified children, and a glimpse of agitated people close at hand, and others running towards him. The man with the big boat under his arm said, "By gum!" Colonel Tempest looked at him. He felt nothing. Had he failed? The smoke came curling out at his collar, and something dropped from his nerveless hand and lay gleaming on the grass. There was a sound of many waters in his ears. "He might have spared the children," said a man's voice, tremulous with indignation.