Gerda gasped “Kay,” and they saw him struggling twenty yards behind.

“Can you do it?” Barry shouted to him, and Kay grinned back.

“Let you know presently....  Oh yes, I’m all right.  Getting on fine.”

Nan stood up on the rock, watching him, measuring with expert eye the ratio between distance and pace, the race between Kay’s swimming and the sea.  It seemed to her to be anyone’s race.

Barry didn’t stand up.  The strain of the swim had been rather too much for him, and in his violent lurch onto the rock he had strained his side.  He lay flat, feeling battered and sick.

The sea, Nan judged after another minute of watching, was going to beat Kay in this race.  For Kay’s face had turned a curious colour, and he was blue round the lips.  Kay’s heart was not strong.

Nan’s dive into the tossing waves was as pretty a thing as one would wish to see.  The swoop of it carried her nearly to Kay’s side.  Coming up she caught one of his now rather limp hands and put it on her left shoulder, saying “Hold tight.  A few strokes will do it.”

Kay, who was no fool and who had known that he was beaten, held tight, throwing all his exhausted strength into striking out with his other three limbs.

They were carried round the point, beyond reach of it had not Barry’s outstretched hand been ready.  Nan touched it, barely grasped it, just and no more, as they were swung seawards.  It was enough.  It pulled them to the rock’s side.  Again Nan wriggled and scrambled up, and then they dragged Kay heavily after them as he fainted.

“Neat,” said Barry to Nan, his appreciation of a well-handled job, his love of spirit and skill, rising as it were to cheer, in spite of his exhaustion and his concern for Gerda and Kay.  “My word, Nan, you’re a sportsman.”

“He does faint sometimes,” said Gerda of Kay.  “He’ll be all right in a minute.”

Kay came to.

“Oh Lord,” he said, “that was a bit of a grind.”  And then, becoming garrulous with the weak and fatuous garrulity of those who have recently swooned, “Couldn’t have done it without you, Nan.  I’d given myself up for lost.  All my past life went by me in a flash....  I really did think it was U.P. with me, you know.  And it jolly nearly was, for all of us, wasn’t it?...  Whose idea was it bathing just here?  Yours, Nan.  Of course.  It would be.  No wonder you felt our lives on your conscience and had to rescue us all.  Oh Lord, the water I’ve drunk!  I do feel rotten.”

“We all look pretty rotten, I must say,” Nan commented, looking from Kay’s limp greenness to Gerda’s shivering blueness, from Gerda to Barry, prostrate, bruised and coughing, from Barry to her own cut and battered knees and elbows, bleeding with the unaccountable profuseness of limbs cut by rocks in the sea.  “I may die from loss of blood, and the rest of you from prostration, and all of us from cold.  Are we well enough to scale the rocks now and get to our clothes?”