“What, Miss Granger,” he said, “should a man say to a lady who but last night saved his life, at the risk, indeed almost at the cost, of her own?”

“It was nothing,” she answered, colouring; “I clung to you, that was all, more by instinct than from any motive.  I think I had a vague idea that you might float and support me.”

“Miss Granger, the occasion is too serious for polite fibs.  I know how you saved my life.  I do not know how to thank you for it.”

“Then don’t thank me at all, Mr. Bingham.  Why should you thank me?  I only did what I was bound to do.  I would far rather die than desert a companion in distress, of any sort; we all must die, but it would be dreadful to die ashamed.  You know what they say, that if you save a person from drowning you will do them an injury afterwards.  That is how they put it here; in some parts the saying is the other way about, but I am not likely ever to do you an injury, so it does not make me unhappy.  It was an awful experience:  you were senseless, so you cannot know how strange it felt lying upon the slippery rock, and seeing those great white waves rush upon us through the gloom, with nothing but the night above, and the sea around, and death between the two.  I have been lonely for many years, but I do not think that I ever quite understood what loneliness really meant before.  You see,” she added by way of an afterthought, “I thought that you were dead, and there is not much company in a corpse.”

“Well,” he said, “one thing is, it would have been lonelier if we had gone.”

“Do you think so?” she answered, looking at him inquiringly.  “I don’t quite see how you make that out.  If you believe in what we have been taught, as I think you do, wherever it was you found yourself there would be plenty of company, and if, like me, you do not believe in anything, why, then, you would have slept, and sleep asks for nothing.”

“Did you believe in nothing when you lay upon the rock waiting to be drowned, Miss Granger?”

“Nothing!” she answered; “only weak people find revelation in the extremities of fear.  If revelation comes at all, surely it must be born in the heart and not in the senses.  I believed in nothing, and I dreaded nothing, except the agony of death.  Why should I be afraid?  Supposing that I am mistaken, and there is something beyond, is it my fault that I cannot believe?  What have I done that I should be afraid?  I have never harmed anybody that I know of, and if I could believe I would.  I wish I had died,” she went on, passionately; “it would be all over now.  I am tired of the world, tired of work and helplessness, and all the little worries which wear one out.  I am not wanted here, I have nothing to live for, and I wish that I had died!”

“Some day you will think differently, Miss Granger.  There are many things that a woman like yourself can live for—­at the least, there is your work.”