Then the men tied a rope round the girl's arms, dropped her calmly into the water again, resumed their oars, and rowed sullenly back the mile to the village. Behind them the body spun at the end of its long rope. In the stern-sheets curses and blasphemies bubbled from the lips of a gibbering maniac.
When they reached the shore, not only was life extinct, but both the girl's arms were broken. The sea itself would have been more merciful than that.
* * * * * *
When Fairchild awoke from his long bout of brain fever his eyes fell upon Seymour.
'Why didn't you save her as you promised?' were the first words he uttered.
'Nonsense, old man, you're wandering still. Of course I saved her. You forget, it was her sister Ruth that those devils murdered.'
'Oh, it's all a horrible mistake,' groaned the invalid, as he buried his face in his hands and turned his head to the wall, moaning like a wounded thing in pain.
THE AIR-GUN
It was Philip Brandon's last day at Oxford. Behind him lay four pleasant years spent partly in dawdling through the Honors schools, chiefly in gratifying his own various tastes for athletics, social intercourse, and contemporary literature. In front of him lay—what? The thought stuck in his throat; so, in an unsettled spirit, he lit a cigar and sauntered out into the High, with a vague idea of doing the rounds as he used in his schoolboy days, and taking a last farewell of the old city's 'coronal of towers.'