Suddenly Varick roused himself.
"Can you swim?" He gripped Donnington strongly by the arm. "If not, it's—it's no good your going in—you'd only drown too."
Donnington wrenched himself free from the other's hold, and, rushing down the bank, threw himself into the icy cold water....
Suddenly he saw, a long way off, a small, shapeless, mass rising ... he swam towards it, and then he gave a sobbing gasp of relief. It was Bubbles ... Bubbles already unconscious; but of that he was vaguely glad, knowing that it would much simplify his task.
Very soon, although he was quite unaware of it, the affrighted, startled little crowd of people gathered together just above the place where he was painfully, slowly, swimming about, looking for a spot where he could try and effect a landing with his now heavy, inert burden.
Dr. Panton threw himself down flat across the path and held out a walking stick over the slippery mud bank, but the stick was hopelessly, grotesquely out of Donnington's reach.
All at once Blanche Farrow detached herself from the others and began running towards the cottage which formed the apex of the reservoir. "I'm going for a rope," she called out. "I'll be back in three or four minutes." But, thanks to Dr. Panton's ingenuity, the man in the water had not to wait even so short a time as that.
"Have any of you a good long scarf?" asked the doctor, and then, quite eagerly for him, James Tapster produced a wonderful scarf—the sort of scarf a millionaire would wear, so came the whimsical thought to Sir Lyon. It was wide and very long, made of the finest knitted silk. When firmly tied to the handle of the walking stick, the floating end of the scarf was within reach of Donnington. With its help he even managed to secure a foothold on the narrow one-brick ledge which terminated the deep underwater wall of the reservoir.
The doctor called down to him with some urgency: "I wish you could manage to hoist her up, Donnington. Time is of the utmost importance in these cases!"
But Donnington, try as he might, was too spent to obey; and it seemed an eternity to them all before Blanche Farrow reappeared, helping an old man to drag a short ladder along the muddy path.