breathed more freely. He stooped to discover the hidden coil of
rope, kept safe and dry in a hole under a great round flat piece of
rock: his head was bent down; he did not see his father approach,
nor did he hear his footstep for the rush of blood to his head in the
stooping effort of lifting the stone; the Squire had grappled with
him before he rose up again, before he fully knew whose hands
detained him, now, when his liberty of person and action seemed
secure. He made a vigorous struggle to free himself; he wrestled
with his father for a moment--he pushed him hard, and drove him on to
the great displaced stone, all unsteady in its balance.

Down went the Squire, down into the deep waters below--down after him
went Owen, half consciously, half unconsciously, partly compelled by
the sudden cessation of any opposing body, partly from a vehement
irrepressible impulse to rescue his father. But he had instinctively
chosen a safer place in the deep seawater pool than that into which
his push had sent his father. The Squire had hit his head with much
violence against the side of the boat, in his fall; it is, indeed,
doubtful whether he was not killed before ever he sank into the sea.
But Owen knew nothing save that the awful doom seemed even now
present. He plunged down, he dived below the water in search of the
body which had none of the elasticity of life to buoy it up; he saw
his father in those depths, he clutched at him, he brought him up and
cast him, a dead weight, into the boat, and exhausted by the effort,
he had begun himself to sink again before he instinctively strove to
rise and climb into the rocking boat. There lay his father, with a
deep dent in the side of his head where the skull had been fractured
by his fall; his face blackened by the arrested course of the blood.
Owen felt his pulse, his heart--all was still. He called him by his
name.