The tempest which shook her shook him also, and he swayed from side to
side like an animal uncertain if the moment had come to try its strength
with its foe; and in truth the man was fighting with himself. His
moments with Jean Jacques at the flume had expanded him in a curious kind
of way. His own arguments while he was fighting for his life had, in a
way, convinced himself. She was a rare creature, and she was alluring--
more alluring than she had ever been; for a tragic sense had made her
thinner, had refined the boldness of her beauty, had given a wonderful
lustre to her eyes; and suffering has its own attraction to the
degenerate. But he, George Masson, had had a great shock, and he had
come out of the jaws of death by the skin of his teeth. It had been the
nearest thing he had ever known; for though once he had had a pistol
pointed at him, there was the chance that it might miss at half-a-dozen
yards, while there was no chance of the lever of the flume going wrong;
and water and a mill-wheel were as absolute as the rope of the gallows.
In a sense he had saved himself by his cleverness, but if Jean Jacques
had not been just the man he was, he could not have saved himself.
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