"Dead or alive, that is the only question," said Geoffrey. "Get back to the house, Jim, and bring the doctor here. I don't know what to do to a drowned man."
Jim made an obvious call on his resolution. To stay here with that dripping clay at his feet was a task that demanded more courage than he had needed to get into Harry's bed.
"No, sir," he said. "You run back to the house and get your wet things off. I'll stay here!" and he set his teeth.
Geoffrey could not deny the common sense of this, nor indeed had he any wish to, and shuffled and groped back to the house. As yet he knew nothing except that Harry was safe, and for the present his curiosity was gorged with that satisfying assurance. The hall door he found open, the hall empty and lit, and running upstairs, he saw the door of Harry's bedroom open, and went in. The doctor was there; he was just covering with a sheet that which he had removed from the floor on to Harry's bed. He turned round as Geoffrey entered.
"Quick!" said the latter. "Go down to the sluice. Sanders lost his way in the fog, and fell in. We fished him out, alive or dead I don't know."
His eye fell on the covered shape on the bed with an awful and sudden misgiving, for it was Harry's room.
"Not——" he began.
The doctor turned back the sheet for a moment, and then replaced it quickly.
"Go to my room very quietly, Geoffrey," he said, "for Harry is asleep next door, and get your wet things off. Put on blankets or something, or clothes of mine. By the sluice, you say?"
It was some half hour later that Geoffrey heard slow, stumbling steps on the stairs, and barefooted and wrapped in blankets he went out into the passage. Jim and the doctor were carrying what he had found in the ooze of the lake into Harry's room, and they laid it on the floor by the bed.