Nasmyth hesitated, regarding her compassionately, but she made a sign of protest.
“Go on! Don’t keep me in suspense!”
“Clarence,” said Nasmyth quietly, “is dead. Lisle is rather badly damaged.”
Millicent left the canoe and sat down, very white in face, upon a neighboring stone. In the meanwhile the other canoes had grounded and her companions gathered about her. She did not speak to them and some time passed before she turned to Nasmyth.
“Tell me all,” she begged.
He briefly related what had happened, and there was an impressive silence when he finished. Then Millicent slowly rose.
“And Lisle’s badly hurt,” she said. “We must go on!”
They relaunched the canoes and Nasmyth had no further speech with her, for as they floated down-river she sat, still and silent, in another canoe. She was conscious chiefly of an unnerving horror and a sense of contrition. Clarence was dead, and she had been coldly hypercritical; hardly treating him as a lover, thinking of his failings. She blamed herself bitterly in a half-dazed fashion, but it was only afterward she realized that she had not been troubled by any very poignant sense of loss.
After a while Nasmyth said they would land, but Millicent roused herself to countermand his instructions and eventually they reached Batley’s camp. Lisle had got up during the day and he now walked painfully down to the water’s edge to meet her. When she landed he gravely pressed her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply. “We did what we could to save him.”