Then it cracked. And I feared for him. If he should have chanced on a spot where the depth was twenty feet! And should be drowned before my eyes! The cracking noise grew more instead of less.
"I fancy I shall do better by lying down and taking to my hands and knees; it will be spreading my weight over a larger surface."
He lay flat on the ice; wriggling towards me somehow, like a snake. It was a pretty slow process; especially as the icy water was wrapping my draperies about me and freezing the blood in my veins; and I was either sinking lower and lower, or else imagining that I was, which was just as bad. At last he came within three feet of me--within two--within reach. When I got my hands in his I burst out crying.
"Will you ever forgive me?" I sobbed.
"My darling!"
"I'll always do as you wish me to in the future--always--if I'm not drowned."
"My sweet!"
I did not notice what he was saying to me; nor, for the matter of that, what I was saying to him. Though I should not have cared if I had. I was too far gone. He put his hands underneath my arms; but directly he began raising me the ice on which he was lying gave way, and, in another second he was standing beside me in the water. Just as I was thinking of starting screaming, for I made sure that it was all over with both of us, he lifted me as if I were a baby, and I found that the water scarcely came over his waist, and he kissed me.
And I never was so happy; although, for all I knew, at that very moment we might be drowning.
But we did not drown. We reached the shore, though it took us a tremendous time to do it. Because Philip had to break every bit of ice in front of us. And though none of it was strong enough to bear, it was not easy to break. Luckily the water grew shallower as we advanced. So it must have been somewhere else that it was twenty feet.