I know how
you saved my life. I do not know how to thank you for it."
"Then don't thank me at all, Mr. Bingham. Why should you thank me? I
only did what I was bound to do. I would far rather die than desert a
companion in distress, of any sort; we all must die, but it would be
dreadful to die ashamed. You know what they say, that if you save a
person from drowning you will do them an injury afterwards. That is how
they put it here; in some parts the saying is the other way about, but I
am not likely ever to do you an injury, so it does not make me unhappy.
It was an awful experience: you were senseless, so you cannot know how
strange it felt lying upon the slippery rock, and seeing those great
white waves rush upon us through the gloom, with nothing but the night
above, and the sea around, and death between the two. I have been lonely
for many years, but I do not think that I ever quite understood what
loneliness really meant before. You see," she added by way of an
afterthought, "I thought that you were dead, and there is not much
company in a corpse."
"Well," he said, "one thing is, it would have been lonelier if we had
gone.
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