Carroll spread out his hands, as if to beg her forbearance, and while every impulse urged him to the leap he endeavoured to keep his head.
“I can’t do any good just now,” he answered, knowing he was right and yet feeling horribly ashamed. “She’s holding on, and Wallace will reach her in a moment or two.”
Evelyn broke out on him in an agony of fear and anger. “You coward!” she cried. “Will you let her drown?”
She turned and ran forward, but Carroll, dreading that she meant to attempt the descent, seized her shoulder and held her fast. While he grappled with her, Vane’s voice rose from below, and he let his hands drop.
“Wallace has her! There’s no more danger,” he said.
Evelyn suddenly recovered some degree of calm.
Standing, breathless, a pace or two apart, they saw Vane and the girl appear from beneath the willows and wash away down-stream. The man was swimming but he was hampered by his burden, and once he and Mabel sank almost from sight in a whirling eddy. Carroll said nothing, but he turned and ran along the sloping ridge, until where the fall was less and the trees were thinner he leaped out into the air. He broke through the alders amidst a rustle of bending boughs and disappeared; but a moment later his head rose out of the water close beside Vane, and the two men went down-stream with Mabel between them.
Evelyn scrambled wildly along the ridge, and when she reached the foot of it Vane was helping Mabel up the sloping bank of gravel. The girl’s drenched garments clung about her, her wet hair was streaked across her face; but she seemed able to stand, and she was speaking in jerky gasps. The hunt had swept on through shoaler water, but there was a cheer from the stragglers across the river. Evelyn clutched her sister, half laughing, half sobbing, and incoherently upbraided her. Mabel shook herself free, and her first remark was characteristic.
“Oh!” she said, “don’t make a silly fuss.” Then she tried to shake out her dripping skirt. “I’m only wet through, Wallace, take me home.”
Vane picked her up, which was what she seemed to expect, and the others followed when he pushed through the underbush towards a neighbouring meadow. Evelyn, however, was still a little unnerved, and when they reached a gap in a wall she stopped, and leaning against the stones turned to Carroll.