She heard her go gently to the left, past the window; and yet her footfall was all but inaudible.  No rain had fallen, and her shoes ought to have sounded on the hard earth.  She must have taken them off.  There, she was stopping, just by the school-door.  Now she moved again.  She must have stopped to put on her shoes; for now Grace could hear her steps distinctly, down the earth bank, and over the rattling shingle of the beach.  Where was she going?  Grace must follow!

The door was fast:  but in a moment she had removed the table, opened the shutter and the window.

“Thank God that I stayed here on the ground floor, instead of going back to my own room when Major Campbell left.  It is a providence!  The Lord has not forsaken me yet!” said the sweet saint, as, catching up her shawl, she wrapped it round her, and slipping through the window, crouched under the shadow of the house, and looked for her mother.

She was hurrying over the rocks, a hundred yards off.  Whither?  To drown herself in the sea?  No; she held on along the mid-beach, right across the cove, toward Arthur’s Nose.  But why?  Grace must know.

She felt, she knew not why, that this strange journey, that wild “The Lord will provide,” had to do with the subject of her suspicion.  Perhaps this was the crisis; perhaps all will he cleared up to-night, for joy or for utter shame.

The tide was low; the beach was bright in the western moonlight:  only along the cliff foot lay a strip of shadow a quarter of a mile long, till the Nose, like a great black wall, buried the corner of the cove in darkness.

Along that strip of shadow she ran, crouching; now stumbling over a boulder, now crushing her bare feet between the sharp pebbles, as, heedless where she stepped, she kept her eye fixed on her mother.  As if fascinated, she could see nothing else in heaven or earth but that dark figure, hurrying along with a dogged determination, and then stopping a moment to look round, as if in fear of a pursuer.  And then Grace lay down on the cold stones, and pressed herself into the very earth; and the moment her mother turned to go forward, sprang up and followed.

And then a true woman’s thought flashed across her, and shaped itself into a prayer.  For herself she never thought:  but if the Coast Guardsman above should see her mother, stop her, question her?  God grant that he might be on the other side of the point!  And she hurried on again.

Near the Nose the rocks ran high and jagged; her mother held on to them, passed through a narrow chasm, and disappeared.

Grace now, not fifty yards from her, darted out of the shadow into the moonlight, and ran breathlessly toward the spot where she had seen her mother last.  Like Anderssen’s little sea-maiden she went, every step on sharp knives, across the rough beds of barnacles; but she felt no pain, in the greatness of her terror and her love.

She crouched between the rocks a moment; heard her mother slipping and splashing among the pools; and glided after her like a ghost—­a guardian angel rather—­till she saw her emerge again for a moment into the moonlight, upon a strip of beach beneath the Nose.