"Yes; and that is about all that can be said. He isn't drowned; but he is old, and the shock has gone pretty near to snapping the thread."
"Of course, you remember him?" she said, looking away across the leaping waters.
Griswold, with his heart on fire with generous emotions, felt the cold hand gripping him again.
"He is the old gentleman you introduced me to at the Inn the other day: Galbraith; is that the name?"
"Yes," she rejoined, still looking away; "that is the name."
Griswold fell silent for the time; but a little later, when the catboat was rushing in long plunges through the entrance to the Wahaskan arm of the lake, he said: "You are going to take him to Mereside?"
"Yes. He is a friend of poppa's. And, anyway, it's the nearest place, and you said there was no time to lose."
There were anxious watchers on the Mereside landing-stage: the gardener, the stable-man, Thorsen, and three or four others. When the landing was safely made, Miss Grierson took command and issued her orders briskly.
"Four of you carry Mr. Galbraith up to the house, and you, Thorsen, put Baldur into the two-wheeled trap and be ready to go for Doctor Farnham when I tell you where you can find him. Johnnie Fergus, you come here and take care of the _Clytie_; you know how to furl down and moor her."
Griswold helped the bearers lift the blanketed figure out of the _Clytie's_ cockpit, and while he was doing it, the steel-gray eyes of the rescued one opened slowly to fix a stony gaze upon the face of the man who was bending over him. What the thin lips were muttering Griswold heard, and so did one other. "So it's you, is it, ye murdering blue-eyed deevil?" And then: "Eh, man, man, but I'm sick!"
Griswold walked with Margery at the tail of the little procession as it wound its way up the path to the great house.
"You heard what he said?" he inquired craftily.
"Yes: he is out of his head, and no wonder," she said soberly. Then: "You must go home and change at once; you are drenched to the skin. Don't wait to come in. I'll take care of your manuscript."
The cyclonic summer storm had blown itself out, and the clouds were beginning to break away in the west, when Griswold, obeying Margery's urging to go home and change his clothes, turned his back upon Mereside and his face toward a future of thickening doubts and unnerving possibilities.