"With the men?" he asked. "Surely not."
"Dear fellow," said Mr. Francis, with the most natural manner, "how pedantically exact you are! I must be exact, too, it seems. I was a little ahead of them, for I ran back from the farm, being just a little uneasy about the weight of water that I knew must be pressing on the sluice. I thought, indeed, that when Harry made his first attempt to pull it up, it was a little unsafe for any one to stand there."
Suddenly all his doubts and certainties surged up in Geoffrey's mind.
"Did you warn him?" he asked.
Geoffrey saw Harry's eyebrows knit themselves together in a frown of perplexity which he could not decipher. But Mr. Francis turned to him with the eagerness of a boy anxious to confess.
"I did not," he said, "and all the time that I was going to the farm the thing weighed on me. I ought to have—I ought to have given way to my old-maid feeling of insecurity. But I was afraid—yes, dear lad, I was afraid Harry would laugh at me. Ah, how I repented my silence when I came back and found the sluice gone—gone!" he repeated.
"Yes, it went," said Harry. "I went too."
Mr. Francis looked at him a moment with eyes of horror diminishing to a pin point; then he gave a little low cry and sank down in his chair again.
"What do you say? what do you say?" he murmured. "You were there; you were——"
"Oh, the sluice broke as I was standing on it, having another pull at the wooden gate, as you suggested, and down I went," said Harry. "The flood took me right under the bridge, rather a difficult matter, and a quarter of a mile farther down. Then I got out."