“There lives the girl who saved you,” said he, as they passed Grace Harvey’s door.

“Ah?  I ought to call and pay my respects.”

But Grace was not at home.  The wreck had emptied the school; and Grace had gone after her scholars to the beach.

“We couldn’t keep her away, weak as she was,” said a neighbour, “as soon as she heard the poor corpses were coming ashore.”

“Hum?” said Tom.  “True woman.  Quaint,—­that appetite for horrors the sweet creatures have.  Did you ever see a man hanged, Lieutenant?—­No?  If you had, you would have seen two women in the crowd to one man.  Can you make out the philosophy of that?”

“I suppose they like it, as some people do hot peppers.”

“Or donkeys thistles;—­find a little pain pleasant!  I had a patient once in France, who read Dumas’ ‘Crimes Celebres’ all the week, and the ‘Vies des Saints’ on Sundays, and both, as far as I could see, for just the same purpose,—­to see how miserable people could be, and how much pinching and pulling they could bear.”

So they walked on, along a sheep-path, and over the Spur, and down to the Cove.

It was such a morning as often follows a gale, when the great firmament stares down upon the ruin which it has made, bright and clear, and bold; and seems to say, with shameless smile,—­“There, I have done it; and am as merry as ever after it all!” Beneath a cloudless sky, the breakers, still grey and foul from the tempest, were tumbling in before a cold northern breeze.  Half a mile out at sea, the rough backs of the Chough and Crow loomed black and sulky in the foam.  At their feet, the rocks and shingle of the Cove were alive with human beings—­groups of women and children clustering round a corpse or a chest; sailors, knee-deep in the surf hauling at floating spars and ropes; oil-skinned coast-guardsmen pacing up and down in charge of goods, while groups of farmers’ men, who had hurried down from the villages inland, lounged about on the top of the cliff, looking sulkily on, hoping for plunder:  and yet half afraid to mingle with the sailors below, who looked on them as an inferior race, and refused, in general, to intermarry with them.

The Lieutenant plainly held much the same opinion; for as a party of them tried to descend the narrow path to the beach, he shouted after them to come back.

“Eh! you won’t?” and out rattled from its scabbard the old worthy’s sword.  “Come back, I say, you loafing, miching, wrecking crow-keepers; there are no pickings for you here.  Brown, send those fellows back with the bayonet.  None but blue-jackets allowed on the beach!” And the labourers go up again, grumbling.

“Can’t trust those landsharks.  They’ll plunder even the rings off a corpse’s fingers.  They think every wreck a godsend.  I’ve known them, after they’ve been driven off, roll great stones over the cliff at night on the coast-guard, just out of spite; while these blue-jackets here—­I can depend on them.  Can you tell me the reason of that, as you seem a bit of a philosopher?”