It was a terrible sound, coming through the obscure air of the evening.

‘You’d be better if you were in bed, Winnie,’ Gerald muttered to himself.

He was stooping unlacing his shoes, pushing them off with the foot. Then he threw his soft hat into the bottom of the boat.

‘You can’t go into the water with your hurt hand,’ said Gudrun, panting, in a low voice of horror.

‘What? It won’t hurt.’

He had struggled out of his jacket, and had dropped it between his feet. He sat bare–headed, all in white now. He felt the belt at his waist. They were nearing the launch, which stood still big above them, her myriad lamps making lovely darts, and sinuous running tongues of ugly red and green and yellow light on the lustrous dark water, under the shadow.

‘Oh get her out! Oh Di, DARLING! Oh get her out! Oh Daddy, Oh Daddy!’ moaned the child’s voice, in distraction. Somebody was in the water, with a life belt. Two boats paddled near, their lanterns swinging ineffectually, the boats nosing round.

‘Hi there—Rockley!—hi there!’

‘Mr Gerald!’ came the captain’s terrified voice. ‘Miss Diana’s in the water.’

‘Anybody gone in for her?’ came Gerald’s sharp voice.

‘Young Doctor Brindell, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘Can’t see no signs of them, sir. Everybody’s looking, but there’s nothing so far.’

There was a moment’s ominous pause.

‘Where did she go in?’

‘I think—about where that boat is,’ came the uncertain answer, ‘that one with red and green lights.’

‘Row there,’ said Gerald quietly to Gudrun.

‘Get her out, Gerald, oh get her out,’ the child’s voice was crying anxiously. He took no heed.

‘Lean back that way,’ said Gerald to Gudrun, as he stood up in the frail boat. ‘She won’t upset.’

In another moment, he had dropped clean down, soft and plumb, into the water. Gudrun was swaying violently in her boat, the agitated water shook with transient lights, she realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. She knew he was gone out of the world, there was merely the same world, and absence, his absence. The night seemed large and vacuous. Lanterns swayed here and there, people were talking in an undertone on the launch and in the boats. She could hear Winifred moaning: ‘OH DO FIND HER GERALD, DO FIND HER,’ and someone trying to comfort the child. Gudrun paddled aimlessly here and there. The terrible, massive, cold, boundless surface of the water terrified her beyond words. Would he never come back? She felt she must jump into the water too, to know the horror also.

She started, hearing someone say: ‘There he is.’ She saw the movement of his swimming, like a water–rat. And she rowed involuntarily to him. But he was near another boat, a bigger one. Still she rowed towards him. She must be very near. She saw him—he looked like a seal. He looked like a seal as he took hold of the side of the boat. His fair hair was washed down on his round head, his face seemed to glisten suavely. She could hear him panting.