Nance and Bernel were doing the only thing possible, and
Gard saw that they were all right now that the man had ceased to
struggle.
He picked up Bernel's things, and Nance's, with a curious feeling of
delight and a touch of shyness, her sun-bonnet, her little linen jacket,
her woollen skirt, her neat little wooden sabots, and ran swiftly with
them to the shaft at the head of the gulf.
They would make for the adit, he thought, and so gain the shaft and come
up by the ladders, if, indeed, John Thomas was in any state to climb
ladders.
"Bring some brandy," he shouted to one of the men, and ran on. Nance was
more to him than all the miners in Sark, and it was not brandy she would
be wanting, he knew, but her clothes.
And, since a man needs both his hands to go down almost perpendicular
ladders, he left at the top all that she would not instantly need and
took only the little jacket and the woollen skirt. These he rolled into
a bundle as he ran, and gripped in his teeth as he began the descent,
and rejoiced all the way down in this close intimacy with her clothing.
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