“You are quite safe, Elfie?” he called, anxiously.
Her wild, careless laughter answered him. “Come in, the water’s fine. Come in; oh, come in! I dare you! I dare you!”
She swam off toward the moonlight with powerful side strokes, hardly diminished by her encumbering drapery. “I dare you!” she cried again.
No flesh and blood, not even of the most prudent young lawyer in New York, could withstand such a challenge. Heedless of consequences, Stephen flung himself over into the dark. The water was cold, his clothes were heavy; but he struck out valiantly. “Come on, oh, come on!” called the voice, far away on the surface of the water, and he strained every tendon to follow. A canoe drifted out slowly from somewhere—he didn’t know where—then it seemed to draw nearer, or else to disappear—he didn’t know which. The water was icy cold, his breath drew thick, his limbs, unaccustomed either to the cold or to the unwonted strain, were wrenched with a sudden muscular agony, and seemed to pass from his ownership and his control. Still, in the white moonlight before him, the black streak that he was following moved steadily along. He cursed himself as an effeminate monkey—“beaten by a girl!”
Then girls and Undines, farming implements and crystal palaces, whirled and shimmered dimly before his eyes. All he wanted was to rest—just a chance to rest! And, throwing out both arms, he gave himself up helplessly to the water.
II.
It was late the next morning when Martin thrust his cheerful little face in at the door of Stephen Glyn’s room at the hotel.
“Well, how are you to-day?” cried the newcomer. “Gee, that was a narrow squeak you had last night, and no mistake!”
Stephen woke with a start, and turned in a dim and growing amazement at the stiffness of his limbs, the painful heaviness of his breath. Slowly, as the little Yale man sat chattering by his bed, the troubled events of the night before came back to him—the foolhardy plunge from the breakwater, the interval of blank nothingness, the agonized struggle back into life, the hands working at his chest and his limbs; then the slow opening of his eyelids under the frightened face of young Martin, bending over him.
“Yes, I did make an ass of myself, and no mistake,” he mused, aloud, in a hoarse and broken voice.