"John, for God's sake!" he said, with a low, pleading note. "I'm about done, old man ... what with Margery and--and ... but there's still a chance ... John!" The wretched John was melted again. He left his objections to the preposterous proposal unspoken. He put his hand affectionately on the other's shoulder. "It's all right, Stephen.... I'll manage it somehow ... don't you worry, old boy.... I'll manage it." "Thank God! I'll go now, John.... I'll come down when I hear you come back.... I _must_ go...." Together they hurried down the stairs, and John found himself suddenly alone at the end of his garden in an old mackintosh, bemused and incredulous. The rain had come, a hot, persistent, sibilant rain, and already it had brought the dark. The river was a shadowy mosaic of small splashes. The lights of Barnes showed mistily across the river, like lamps in a photograph. The tide was gathering momentum for the ebb; a mass of leaves and dead branches floated sluggishly past under the wall. John was in the boat, fiddling stupidly at the engine, glistening and splashing in the rain, before he had thought at all what exactly he was going to do to discharge his fantastic undertaking. The engine started miraculously. John cast off and the boat headed doggedly up against the tide, John peering anxiously from side to side at the rain-speckled water. The engine roared and clattered; the boat vibrated, quivering all over; the oars and boathook rattled ceaselessly against the side of the boat--a hollow, monotonous rattle; the exhaust snorted rhythmically astern. The rain splashed and pattered on the engine and on the thwarts, and rolled with a luxurious swishing sound in the bottom. The fly-wheel of the engine revolved like a Catherine-wheel composed of water--water flying in brief tangents from the rim. John had come out without a hat, and his hair was matted and black; the river splashed on his neck and trickled slowly under his collar. It was a heavy task, this, for one man with two hands to attempt, to shield the engine and himself with the same mackintosh, extending it like a wing with one arm over the fly-wheel, and to oil occasionally with an oil-can the mechanism of the pump, to regulate the oil-feed and the water-supply, and do all those little attentions without which the engine usually stopped; and at the same time to steer the boat, and look in the river for the floating body of a dead woman in a sack. It was madness. In that watery dusk his chances of seeing an obscure sack seemed ludicrously small. And what was he to do with it when he had found it? How should he dispose of it more effectually than it had been disposed of before? John did not know.