“Alb—­” The last cry was half-drowned in the water, and when the boat, with half-a-dozen more strokes, reached the place where Westcott was, so that he was able to seize the side, there was no Kate to be seen.  Without waiting to lift the exhausted swimmer into the boat, Charlton and Gray dived.  But the water was twenty feet deep, the divers were utterly out of breath with rowing, and their diving was of no avail.  They kept trying until long after all hope had died out of their hearts.  At last Charlton climbed back into the boat, and sat down.  Then Gray got in.  Westcott was so numb and exhausted from staying in the water so long that he could not get in, but he held to the boat desperately, and begged them to help him.

“Help him in,” said Charlton to Gray.  “I can’t.”

“I’d like to help him out ef he wuz in, mighty well.  I can’t kill a drownin’ man, but blamed ef I gin him a leetle finger of help.  I’d jest as soon help a painter outen the water when I know’d he’d swaller the fust man he come to.”

But Charlton got up and reached a hand to the sinking Westcott.  He shut his eyes while he pulled him in, and was almost sorry he had saved him.  Let us not be too hard on Albert.  He was in the first agony of having reached a hand to save little Katy and missed her.  To come so near that you might have succeeded by straining a nerve a little more somewhere—­that is bitterest of all.  If Westcott had only held on a minute!

It was with difficulty that Albert and Gray rowed to the shore, where Plausaby met them, and persuaded them to change their clothes.  They were both soon on the shore again, where large fires were blazing, and the old boat that had failed to save little Katy alive, was now in use to recover her body.  There is no more hopeless and melancholy work than dragging for the body of a drowned person.  The drag moves over the bottom; the man who holds the rope, watching for the faintest sensation of resistance in the muscles of his arm, at last feels something drawing against the drag, calls to the oarsmen to stop rowing, lets the line slip through his fingers till the boat’s momentum is a little spent, lest he should lose his hold, then he draws on his line gently, and while the boat drifts back, he reverently, as becomes one handling the dead, brings the drag to the surface, and finds that its hooks have brought up nothing but water-weeds, or a waterlogged bough.  And when at last, after hours of anxious work, the drag brings the lifeless body to the surface, the disappointment is bitterest of all.  For all the time you have seemed to be seeking the drowned person, and now at last you have got—­what?

It was about eleven o’clock when they first began to drag.  Albert had a sort of vague looking for something, a superstitious feeling that by some sort of a miracle Katy would yet be found alive.  It is the hardest work the imagination has to do—­this realizing that one who has lived by us will never more be with us.  It is hard to project a future for ourselves, into which one who has filled a large share of our thought and affection shall never come.  And so there lingers a blind hope, a hopeless hope of something that shall make unreal that which our impotent imaginations refuse to accept as real.  It is a means by which nature parries a sudden blow.