“‘Help me!’ he cried”
Helia’s fever had passed, and her dreams were calmed. She felt herself very lowly and little, crushed at the foot of the cliff—herself like a bit of jetsam amid the broken fragments of the rock. She dipped her hand in the water and amused herself by letting it run out between her fingers in a shining shower. Or, again, she plunged her arms to the bottom, tearing up the sea-flowers, the dainty algæ, and placing them in her hair, mingling them with the unbound tresses. Then she bent over, to look at herself in the water, like a child.
“I am really like the Morgana in Phil’s picture,” she thought.
Meanwhile, even in the little creek where Helia was looking at herself, the water had grown less calm, and a current was rushing out to the open sea. Helia stood, stretched her limbs, and looked at the yacht.
“Come!” she said to herself, “en route! It is time to go!”
She was just taking her spring when she stopped short, listening. Uncertain cries were borne in to her on the breeze. They came from the shore. All that part of the bay, and the castle itself, were hidden from her by a wall of cliffs.
“What can be the matter?” she asked herself. “Are those cries of distress?”
Just then, a little boat with a child for its sole passenger floated out before her, amid the shoals, borne on by the ebbing current.