“That’s right. We’ve wasted too much time in talking as it is, and—”
“But Harry—Madelaine—she loves you.”
He wrested himself from her violently, and stood with his hands pressed to his head. A few moments before he had been firm and determined, but the agonised thought of Madelaine and of giving her up for ever had ended the fictitious strength which had enabled him to go so far.
It was the result of his long agony shut up in that cave; and though he struggled hard he could do no more, but completely unnerved, trembling violently, and glancing wildly from time to time at the door and window, he sank at his sister’s feet and clutched her knees.
“Harry, Harry!” she whispered—she, the stronger now—“for Heaven’s sake don’t give way like that.”
“It’s all over now. I’m dead beat; I can do no more.”
“Then let me go for father; let me fetch him from Van Heldre’s.”
“Yes,” he moaned; “and while you are gone I’ll go down to the end of the point and jump in. This time I shall be too weak to swim.”
“Harry, don’t talk like that!” she cried, embracing him, as she saw with horror the pitiable, trembling state in which he was.
“I can’t help it,” he whispered as he clung to her now like a frightened child, and looked wildly at the door. “You don’t know what I’ve suffered, buried alive like, in that cave, and expecting the sea to come in and drown me. It has been one long horror.”