slopes of the Cheviots on one side of Tweed and of the Lammermoor Hills on the other, only just showed above the line of the sea.  There was, I say, nothing visible on all that level of scarcely stirred water but our own sails, set to catch whatever breeze there was, when that happened which not only brought me to the very gates of death, but, in the mere doing of it, gave me the greatest horror of any that I have ever known.

I was standing up at the moment, one foot on the gunwale, the other on the planking behind me, carelessly balancing myself while I stared across the sea in search of some object which he—­this man that I trusted so thoroughly and in whose company I had spent so many pleasant hours that afternoon, and who was standing behind me at the moment—­professed to see in the distance, when he suddenly lurched against me, as if he had slipped and lost his footing.  That was what I believed in that startling moment—­but as I went head first overboard I was aware that his fall was confined to a sprawl into the scuppers.  Overboard I went!—­but he remained where he was.  And my weight—­I was weighing a good thirteen stone at that time, being a big and hefty youngster—­carried me down and down into the green water, for I had been shot over the side with considerable impetus.  And when I came up, a couple of boat’s-lengths from the yacht, expecting to find that he was bringing her up so that I could scramble aboard, I saw with amazed and incredulous affright that he was doing nothing of the sort; instead, working at it as hard as he could go, he was letting out a couple of reefs which he had taken up in the mainsail an hour before—­in another minute they were out, the yacht moved more swiftly, and, springing to the tiller, he deliberately steered her clear away from me.

I suppose I saw his purpose all at once.  Perhaps it drove me wild, mad, frenzied.  The yacht was going away from me fast—­faster; good swimmer though I was, it was impossible for me to catch up to her—­she was making her own length to every stroke I took, and as she drew away he stood there, one hand on the tiller, the other in his pocket (I have often wondered if it was fingering a revolver in there!), his eyes turned steadily on me.  And I began first to beg and entreat him to save me, and then to shout out and curse him—­and at that, and seeing that we were becoming further and further separated, he deliberately put the yacht still more before the freshening wind, and went swiftly away, and looked at me no more.

So he left me to drown.

We had been talking a lot about swimming during the afternoon, and I had told him that though I had been a swimmer ever since boyhood, I had never done more than a mile at a stretch, and then only in the river.  He knew, therefore, that he was leaving me a good fourteen miles from land with not a sail in sight, not a chance of being picked up.  Was it likely that I could make land?—­was there ever a probability of anything coming along that would sight me?  There was small likelihood, anyway; the likelihood was that long before the darkness had come on I should be exhausted, give up, and go down.