CHAPTER XLV.

The mighty reflux, which, after a short struggle, overpowered the rush of water from the windows, and carried Grace Carden’s helpless body away from the tree, drove her of course back toward the houses, and she was whirled past Little’s window with fearful velocity, just as he was going to leap into the flood, and perish in an insane attempt to save her.  With a loud cry he seized her by her long floating hair, and tried to draw her in at the window; but the mighty water pulled her from him fiercely, and all but dragged him in after her; he was only saved by clutching the side of the wall with his left hand:  the flood was like some vast solid body drawing against him; and terror began to seize on his heart.  He ground his teeth; he set his knee against the horizontal projection of the window; and that freed his left hand; he suddenly seized her arm with it, and, clutching it violently, ground his teeth together, and, throwing himself backward with a jerk, tore her out of the water by an effort almost superhuman.  Such was the force exerted by the torrent on one side, and the desperate lover on the other, that not her shoes only, but her stockings, though gartered, were torn off her in that fierce struggle.

He had her in his arms, and cried aloud, and sobbed over her, and kissed her wet cheeks, her lank hair, and her wet clothes, in a wild rapture.  He went on kissing her and sobbing over her so wildly and so long, that Coventry, who had at first exulted with him at her rescue, began to rage with jealousy.

“Please remember she is my wife,” he shrieked:  “don’t take advantage of her condition, villain!”

“Your wife, you scoundrel!  You stole her from me once; now come and take her from me again.  Why didn’t you save her?  She was near to you.  You let her die:  she lives by me, and for me, and I for her.”  With this he kissed her again, and held her to his bosom.  “D’ye see that?—­liar! coward! villain!”

Even across that tremendous body of rushing death, from which neither was really safe, both rivals’ eyes gleamed hate at each other.

The wild beasts that a flood drives together on to some little eminence, lay down their natures, and the panther crouches and whimpers beside the antelope; but these were men, and could entertain the fiercest of human passions in the very jaws of death.

To be sure it was but for a moment; a new danger soon brought them both to their senses; an elm-tree whirling past grazed Coventry’s plane-tree; it was but a graze, yet it nearly shook him off into the flood, and he yelled with fear:  almost at the same moment a higher wave swept into Little’s room, and the rising water set every thing awash, and burst over him as he kneeled with grace.  He got up, drenched and half-blinded with the turbid water, and, taking Grace in his arms, waded waist-high to his bed, and laid her down on it.