“Oh, this is too absurd!”

That was Guthrie’s mental ejaculation in the astonishing first moment.  A deep-sea sailor, who had come through what he had come through, to let himself be caught unawares by such a paltry mischance as this!  Then, what an unspeakable ass to have been so careless—­to have shown himself incapable of protecting his wife, after all his boasts!  Would he ever hear the last of it as long as he lived?  Poor little woman!  How cold the water felt when he thought of her tender skin.  And her pretty dress, that she had set such store by, in which she had intended to go to church with him on Sunday—­utterly destroyed, of course!  Well, he must make shift to afford her another and smarter one, and get it made quickly.  She should have her pick and choice.  As the following wave soused his uprising head, slapping him full in the face, so as to confuse and blind him for a second or two, the fear that she might get “a dose of it” before they could pull her out made him sharply anxious.  If she got a bad cold, a shock to her nerves, perhaps a serious illness, he would never forgive himself.  And what a sell that would be—­what waste of this precious holiday, this second honeymoon, so much sweeter than the first—­after the weary waiting for it!

He cleared his eyes, and had a momentary view of the surroundings before another wave rushed upon him.  Waves they were, by George!  He would not have believed it possible that such a sea would be running right up here, in this little duck-pond of a bay.  It had seemed rough on the boat, but viewed from the surface, it might have been the middle of Atlantic wastes.  They were in the river channel—­worse luck!—­and the south wind was dead on to it, bringing up the swell from outside; and the swell, that had set that way for days, was so heavy as to drive him back faster than his powerful limbs could propel him in the other direction.  At first the launch seemed to want to dance over him, but when he rose on a swirl of water to take his bearings after the first bewilderment, she was a couple of lengths away, cutting the most extraordinary capers in her efforts to put about.  Her own lights, and those of the beacons at the river mouth, showed him all her stern grating and bright deck fittings as she heeled over, hanging to the side of one of those ridiculous ocean rollers out of bounds; and he thought it no wonder that he—­even he—­had been tossed off under the circumstances.  The crew, who were not sitting on a skimming dish, as it were, had their work cut out to hold on.  As he looked, he measured his drift with serious disquietude, although the preposterous idea of anybody being drowned had not as yet occurred to him.  Drowned here!  A good joke, indeed!  Why, they were within hail of Sandridge, and half-a-dozen ships—­or they would have been, but for the noise of wind and water, which smothered lesser sounds; and the lights of Williamstown—­amongst them that of the little home awaiting him—­ studded the shore on the other hand, near and clear, like the eyes of a host of watching friends.  And in Hobson’s Bay, which could hardly cover the body of a sunk yacht; and right up by the river, which had to be dredged all the time to keep it open!