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The men were still dragging the lake when he got back. He stood on the bank and heard Gerald’s voice. The water was still booming in the night, the moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive. The lake was sinking. There came the raw smell of the banks, in the night air.

Up at Shortlands there were lights in the windows, as if nobody had gone to bed. On the landing-stage was the old doctor, the father of the young man who was lost. He stood quite silent, waiting. Birkin also stood and watched. Gerald came up in a boat.

“You still here, Rupert?” he said. “We can’t get them. The bottom slopes, you know, very steep. The water lies between two very sharp slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will take you. It isn’t as if it was a level bottom. You never know where you are, with the dragging.”

“Is there any need for you to be working?” said Birkin. “Wouldn’t it be much better if you went to bed?”

“To bed! Good God, do you think I should sleep? We’ll find them, before I go away from here.”

“But the men would find them just the same without you—why should you insist?”

Gerald looked up at him. Then he put his hand affectionately on Birkin’s shoulder, saying:

“Don’t you bother about me, Rupert. If there’s anybody’s health to think about, it’s yours, not mine. How do you feel yourself?”

“Very well. But you, you spoil your own chance of life—you waste your best self.”

Gerald was silent for a moment. Then he said:

“Waste it? What else is there to do with it?”

“But leave this, won’t you? You force yourself into horrors, and put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck. Come away now.”

“A mill-stone of beastly memories!” Gerald repeated. Then he put his hand again affectionately on Birkin’s shoulder. “God, you’ve got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.”

Birkin’s heart sank. He was irritated and weary of having a telling way of putting things.

“Won’t you leave it? Come over to my place”—he urged as one urges a drunken man.

“No,” said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man’s shoulder. “Thanks very much, Rupert—I shall be glad to come to-morrow, if that’ll do. You understand, don’t you? I want to see this job through. But I’ll come to-morrow, right enough. Oh, I’d rather come and have a chat with you than—than do anything else, I verily believe. Yes, I would. You mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know.”

“What do I mean, more than I know?” asked Birkin irritably. He was acutely aware of Gerald’s hand on his shoulder. And he did not want this altercation. He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly misery.

“I’ll tell you another time,” said Gerald coaxingly.

“Come along with me now—I want you to come,” said Birkin.

There was a pause, intense and real. Birkin wondered why his own heart beat so heavily. Then Gerald’s fingers gripped hard and communicative into Birkin’s shoulder, as he said:

“No, I’ll see this job through, Rupert. Thank you—I know what you mean. We’re all right, you know, you and me.”

“I may be all right, but I’m sure you’re not, mucking about here,” said Birkin. And he went away.

The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn. Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him.

“She killed him,” said Gerald.

The moon sloped down the sky and sank at last. The lake was sunk to quarter size, it had horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw rottenish water. Dawn roused faintly behind the eastern hill. The water still boomed through the sluice.

As the birds were whistling for the first morning, and the hills at the back of the desolate lake stood radiant with the new mists, there was a straggling procession up to Shortlands, men bearing the bodies on a stretcher, Gerald going beside them, the two grey-bearded fathers following in silence. Indoors the family was all sitting up, waiting. Somebody must go to tell the mother, in her room. The doctor in secret struggled to bring back his son, till he himself