The trivial parts of the affair occupied a curiously exaggerated importance in her reflections. She realized that it was absurdly insignificant, yet she found herself considering chiefly, not the fact that by any effort truly astonishing he had flung her to a refuge far above the boiling river, but the mere incident that while she lay in his arms his scrawny beard, cold and wet, had brushed her cheek—yes, even his mustache. She wondered if he had really kissed her; she was not sure. Nor—and this was another curiosity—did she seem to care.
She remembered, too, the stertorous whistling of his breath as he flung her from him—the queer, Buddhalike appearance of his head, with the hailstones matted among the hair—the way that his eyes blinked as the water streamed down his forehead—the rough and sure clasp of his arms—the fact that one of his feet slid several inches along the rolling deck as he gathered himself for the last effort. All the little things were photographed with microscopic fineness upon her mind.
"There must be better places than this," he suggested. "Come on."
He seized her by the arm, turning her toward a rocky slope that led upward from the ledge. She shook herself free with an impatient energy, resolved that she would do something for herself.
They scrambled up the slope and found themselves at the edge of a grove of trees. Here at last was a partial shelter; they went in under the branches.
Rosalind stumbled ahead, her soaked garments clinging to her legs with a persistence that endeavored to trip her. Now and then a branch snapped ominously above their heads, but they paid no attention to these warnings of a new danger. It seemed like luxury to be shielded even imperfectly from the relentless stabbing of the hail.
"Is it an island?" she asked.
"That's sure," said the boatman as they plunged forward through the shrieking gloom.
"The—the boat is gone?"
She knew it without asking, yet the question rose mechanically to her lips.