Then they swam
back across the channel at its narrowest.
While the water was rushing past their faces, Caius was conscious of
nothing but the animal desire to be on the dry, warm shore again; but
when they touched the bottom and climbed the bank once more to the
place where he had seen the child cast away, he forgot all his fight
with the sea, and thought only with horror of the murder done--or was
there yet hope that by a miracle the child might be found somewhere
alive? It is hope always that causes panic. Caius was panic-stricken.
The woman lay, bound hand and foot, upon the grass.
"If I couldn't ha' tied her," said Jim patronizingly, "I'd a quietened
her by a knock on the head, and gone after the young un, if I'd been
yo'."
The other children had wandered away. They were not to be seen.
Jim knelt down in a business-like way to untie the woman, who seemed now
to be as much stunned by circumstances as if she had been knocked as
just suggested.
A minute more, and Caius found himself running like one mad in the
direction of home. He cared nothing about the mother or the elder
children, or about his own half-dressed condition. The one thought that
excited him was a hope that the sea might have somewhere cast the child
on the shore before she was quite dead.
Running like a savage under the budding trees of the wood and across his
father's fields, he leaped out of the darkness into the heat and
brightness of his mother's kitchen.
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