"The man is dead!" Bayne cried with a poignant intonation. "He is dead! He is dead!"
For while they had waited for the word that had eluded him he had gone out into the great wordless unknown. His failing strength had thwarted his will. His spirit had given him the slip.
Every appliance of resuscitation known to science was brought into use, but in vain. No scrap of paper, no clue of identification, was found upon the body. The three, bound together in such close ties of sympathy, were stricken as with a new and appalling affliction. The burden was all the heavier for that momentary lightening of a treacherous hope. For a time Bayne could not reconcile himself to this new disaster. So overwhelming indeed, so obvious, was its effect that Lillian, ever with her covetous appropriation of every faculty, her grasping claim on every identity in this sacred cause, feared that despair had at last overtaken him, and that he would succumb and give over definitely the search. The idea roused her to a sort of galvanic energy in promoting the project, and she would continually formulate fantastic plans and suggest to him tenuous theories with feverish volubility, only to have him thrust them aside with a lacklustre indifference that their futility merited.
"He is discouraged, Gladys; he is at the end of his resources," she said aside to her friend. "He can try no more."
"How can _you_ believe that?" cried Gladys.
Even in this crisis Lillian noted anew with a wounded amazement the significant smile on the fair face of her friend, the proud pose of her head. Could she arrogate such triumphant confidence in the temper and nature of a man who did not love her?--whose heart and mind were not trusted to her keeping? That doubt assailed Lillian anew in Bayne's absence, and in the scope for dreary meditation that the eventless days afforded it developed a fang that added its cruelties to a grief which she had imagined could be supplemented by no other sorrow.
It was merely sympathy that animated him in her behalf, she felt sure; it was pity for her helplessness when none other would abet the hopeless effort to recover the child. His conviction that Archie still lived constrained him by the dictates of humanity to seek his rescue. He was doubtless moved, too, by the great generosity of his heart, his magnanimity; but not by love--never by love! How could it be, indeed, in the face of all that had come and gone, and of the constant contrast, mind, body, and soul, with the perfect, the peerless Gladys!