She was rushing into the water in despair, with her hands stretched out, but, alas! seeing too clearly that the boat was still out of her reach, and restraining with pain the cry of anguish which would have startled the children, when she felt herself suddenly put aside and a coat, thrown off by some one in rapid motion, fell at her feet. Rosalind did not lose her senses, which were all strung to the last degree of vivid force and capability; but she knew nothing, did not think, was conscious neither of her own existence nor of how this came about, of nothing but the sight before her eyes. She stood among the reeds, her feet in the water, trying to smile to the children, to Amy, upon whom terror was growing, and to keep her own cries from utterance. The plunge of the new-comer in the water startled Johnny. He had got hold of the oar, and in the act of flinging it upon the water with the clap which used to delight him on the lake at home, turned sharply round to see what this new sound meant. Then the light vanished from Rosalind’s eyes. She uttered one cry, which seemed to ring from one end of the lake to the other, and startled the rowers far away on the other side. Then gradually sight came back to her. Had it all turned into death and destruction, that shining water, with its soft reflections, the pretty outline, the floating colors? She heard a sound of voices, the tones of the children, and then the scene became visible again, as if a black shadow had been removed. There was the boat, still floating double, Amy’s face full of smiles, Johnny’s voice raised high--“Oh, _I_ could have doned it!”--a man’s head above the level of the water, a hand upon the side of the boat. Then some one called to her, “No harm done; I will take them back to the beach.” The throbbing went out of Rosalind’s brain and went lower down, till her limbs shook under her, and how to get through the reeds she could not tell. She lifted the coat instinctively and struggled along, taking, it seemed to her, half an hour to retrace the steps which she had made in two minutes in the access of terror which had left her so weak. The nurse, who had fallen helpless on the beach, covering her eyes with her hands not to see the catastrophe, had recovered and got the children in her arms before Rosalind reached them. They were quite at their ease, and skipped about on the shingle, when lifted from the boat, with an air of triumph. “I could have doned it if you had left me alone,” said Johnny, careless of the mingled caresses and reproaches that fell upon him in a torrent--the “Oh, children, you’ve almost killed me!” of nurse, and the passionate clasp with which Rosalind seized upon them. “We were floating beautiful,” said little Amy, oblivious of her terrors; and they began to descant both together upon the delights of their “sail.” “Oh, it is far nicer than those big boats!” “And if he had let me get the oars out I’d have doned it myself,” cried Johnny.