He held up his arms, and with a cry that wasn’t fear Lady Isobel went into them, while Thomas Jefferson Brown called to Lord Meton:
“Stick to the canoe! It will take you to the island!”
IV
The shore was a low, dark streak, four miles away—an appalling distance away; but as she clung lightly to his shoulders, as Thomas Jefferson Brown told her to do, the horror and the fear of the big sea went out of Lady Isobel’s brave little heart. She put her face down against his neck, pulled back his wet hair, and kissed him. God bless all such true hearts, wherever they be!
“We’ll make it, Tom—we’ll make it!” she told him a hundred times.
He felt the warm caresses of her lips, the thrilling love of her voice, and he knew that she was ready to die with him.
He swam in a strange way—a wonderfully strange way—did Thomas Jefferson Brown. He stood almost erect in the water, his head and shoulders clear; and now and then he stopped to rest, and it seemed no test for him at all to float with the weight of the woman he loved, his face turned up to her in those moments, her glorious blue eyes devouring him, her sweet lips kissing him—still kissing him.
He was doing a thing that she knew no other man in the world could do. She kept telling him so, while the land drew nearer and nearer, until at last she cried out in joy that she could see the little bushes along the shore.
“Another mile, Tom!” she said. “Only another mile, and then—”