“To me it looks as if we should drown,” Carlos said at one point, very quietly. “I am sorry for you, Juan.”
“And for yourself, too,” I answered, feeling very hopeless, and with a dogged grimness.
“Just now, my young cousin, I feel as if I should not mind dying under the water,” he remarked with a sigh, but without ceasing to bail for a moment.
“Ah, you are sorry to be leaving home, and your friends, and Spain, and your fine adventures,” I answered.
The blue flare showed a very little nearer. There was nothing to be done but talk and wait.
“No; England,” he answered in a tone full of meaning—“things in England—people there. One person at least.”
To me his words and his smile seemed to imply a bitter irony; but they were said very earnestly.
Castro had hauled the helpless form of old Rangsley forward. I caught him muttering savagely:
“I could kill that old man!”
He did not want to be drowned; neither assuredly did I. But it was not fear so much as a feeling of dreariness and disappointment that had come over me, the sudden feeling that I was going not to adventure, but to death; that here was not romance, but an end—a disenchanted surprise that it should soon be all over.