Vain cry! Almost before it was uttered the seething foam with the sunny glints in it had stifled his swift scream.
Marjory made no sound. White, desperate, she leant over the slippery edge of the shelf, clutched at something that seethed upwards for a second, lost her balance, and was gone--in silence. The heavy foam closed over her like a snow-drift with the sun on it, and all the help the bravest heart could have given was the hope that unconsciousness might come quickly through some kindly rock, and not in the slow agony of suffocation.
It was all over in a minute, for Nature knows her own mind when she is in the tragic mood. She allows no time for unavailing tears. When, not a minute afterwards, Paul Macleod's cry of "Marjory! Marjory!" with its ring of glad certainty, echoed over the pool, there was not a sign to show that she would ever give answer to his call again.
"Marjory! Marjory! Marjory!"
Pitiful appeal, though he knew it not, not even when a vague wonder at her tardiness clouded the careless joy which had come to him with this dawn of a new day, a new life. For the night seemed to have stolen his fears as fit companions for its shadows, and left him nothing but his hopes.
"Marjory! Marjory! Marjory!"
Is there anything in the wide world so terrible as the slow dread which comes as the minutes pass unavailingly by?--as the certainty that something has gone amiss seems to grow from the very passion of protestation against the possibility?--and then, when fear has gone, and unknown grief is the companion of the fruitless search, in which a wild hope will spring up sometimes to intensify the pain? Of such things all men may surely pray that fancy, and not memory, may speak.
It was Tom Kennedy's letter--lighter than the love which had penned it--that gave the first clue, and the hope went out from Paul Macleod's face for ever when his quick eye found it like a foam bubble in a backwater near the ford.
"It will be in the Long Pool we must be looking," whispered the rough, tender voices to each other, but Paul heard. Paul knew, Paul understood what would come--if not that night, then the next day--or the next.
But Fate was merciful, and did not prolong the agony.