A quarter of an hour passes.

“God have mercy!” shouts Brown.  “She’s going!”

The black curve coils up, and then all melts away into the white seething waste.

The coastguard lieutenant settles down in his macintoshes, knowing that his duty is not to leave as long as there is a chance of saving—­not a life, for that was past all hope, but a chest of clothes or a stick of timber.

And with the coastguardsmen many sailors stayed.  Old Captain Willis stays because Grace Harvey, the village schoolmistress, is there, sitting upon a flat slope of rock, a little apart from the rest, with her face resting on her hands, gazing intently out into the wild waste.

“She’s not one of us,” says old Willis.  “There’s no saying what’s going on there in her.  Maybe she’s praying; maybe she sees more than we do, over the sea there.”

“Look at her now!  What’s she after?” Brown replies.

The girl had raised her head, and was pointing toward the sea.  Then she sprang to her feet with a scream.

“A man!  A man!  Save him!”

As she spoke a huge wave rolled in, and out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure.  He looked wildly up and around, and lay clinging with outstretched arms over the edge of the rock.

“Save him!” she shrieked again, as twenty men rushed forward—­and stopped short.  The man was fully thirty yards from them, but between them and him stretched a long, ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, with seething cauldrons within.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come, half-burying the wretched mariner, and tearing across the chasm.

The schoolmistress took one long look, and as the wave retired, rushed after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her knees.

“The wave has carried him across the crack, and she’s got him!” screamed old Willis.  And he sprang upon her, and caught her round the waist.

“Now, if you be men!” shouted he, as the rest hurried down.

“Now, if you be men; before the next wave comes!” shouted big Jan, the fisherman.  “Hands together, and make a line!” And he took a grip with one hand of the old man’s waistband, and held out the other for who would to seize.

Strong hand after hand was clasped, and strong knee after knee dropped almost to the rock, to meet the coming rush of water.

It came, and surged over the man and the girl, and up to old Willis’s throat, and round the knees of Jan and his neighbour; and then followed the returning out-draught, and every limb quivered under the strain; but when the cataract had disappeared, the chain was still unbroken.

“Saved!” and a cheer broke from all lips save those of the girl herself—­she was as senseless as he whom she had saved.

Gently they lifted each, and laid them on the rock; and presently the schoolmistress was safe in bed at her mother’s house.  And the man, weak, but alive, had been carried triumphantly up to the door of Dr. Heale, which having been kicked open, the sailors insisted on carrying him right upstairs, and depositing him on the best spare bed, saying, “If you won’t come to your patients, doctor, your patients shall come to you.”