"Why, the water would go over my head," said Dick.
He pushed out a fat leg and let it dangle against the rock; already the white spray was splashing over it. Susie stared at it incredulously. When the twins left, it had been a shallow pool, and they had waded through it.
"Oh, hurry up, Dick!" she said, in a sudden panic. "Mother will be frightened."
"It's fun, though," said Dick.
Fun! The word did not seem at all the right word to Susie, but she said nothing. She knew now in a flash what the twins meant by the rising tide, but all she saw was her mother's face with the fear on it.
But Susie had not been the eldest of the little family for so many years for nothing. She knew that, whatever happened, Dick must not get bronchitis, and she put her own fear bravely on one side to think of him.
First she slipped over the rock, and found that it reached her waist, and that every wave made it more difficult to stand. With Dick on her back it would be impossible; and the long links of the chain of rocks stretched such a weary way with those shining pools between. The wind roared against the island, and the spray dashed up it; but Susie remembered the grass and the goats, and a gleam of hope sprang up within her.
"O Dick, we are close to the island," she said. "I had quite forgotten. We must clamber over the rocks and get there; and, Dickie darling, even if your foot hurts, you will be brave."
"I will be brave, Susie," said Dick.
The rocks were slippery, and the seaweed popped under their feet like little guns; but jumping, slipping, clinging together, they reached the foot of the island, and then began the difficult scramble upwards. Dick hung heavily on to Susie's skirt, and his little feet were torn and bruised. But Susie's courage was the courage of hope, not of despair. She lifted him over difficult places, and clung to edges of the cliff where it seemed as if even the seagulls had not room to stand. Once she found a narrow track, but she lost it again in the darkness, and still she felt the splash of the waves and heard the startled birds crying overhead. Never, never had Susie been so tired; but those pursuing waves chased her up, and by-and-by she felt dry crags under her feet, and then welcome grass—wet with rain, not sea.