"Do you feel that it is the end?"
"No," the woman answered, searching his face and reading there a message of infinite faith.
Yet even as she spoke the island was a-quiver under the increasing force of the sea's assaults. Nor had it been still at any time since they had put foot on it.
"No man may tell the life of a floating island," Lavelle explained. "In weather like this it is very—very short——"
"Can you repair this boat? Do you intend to mend this hole?"
Her eyes opened in wonderment, for he nodded affirmatively.
"Remember what Browning said: 'To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. And, baffled, get up and begin again——'"
"All clear, master!" called Chang, interrupting Lavelle and leaping out of the boat with the mast and oars in his arms.
Lavelle summoned all hands. They heaved the boat over on its undamaged side. With a strength which peril had trebled, they dragged it out of the miry, jelly-like ground on which it lay and brought it to a ledge on the hill. Man's work though it was, Emily Granville gave her hands to it, with a strange new will, heaving and pulling beside Lavelle until he called that the task was done. And the while she kept repeating to herself, "'To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall. And, baffled, get up and begin again.'"
Just as the boat was laid on the ledge the sun dropped behind the horizon.