I sprang to Dan.  He was not senseless, but in a kind of stupor:  his head had struck the fluke of a half-sunk anchor and it had stunned him, but as the wound bled he recovered slowly and opened his eyes.  Ah, what misery was in them!  I turned to the fugitives.  They were yet in sight, Mr. Gabriel sitting and seeming to adjure Faith, whose skirts he held; but she stood, and her arms were outstretched, and, pale as a foam-wreath her face, and piercing as a night-wind her voice, I heard her cry, “Oh, Georgie!  Georgie!” It was too late for her to cry or to wring her hands now.  She should have thought of that before.  But Mr. Gabriel rose and drew her down, and hid her face in his arms and bent over it; and so they fled up the basin and round the long line of sand, and out into the gloom and the curdling mists.

I bound up Dan’s head.  I couldn’t steer with an oar,—­that was out of the question,—­but, as luck would have it, could row tolerably; so I got down the little mast, and at length reached the wharves.  The town-lights flickered up in the darkness and flickered back from the black rushing river, and then out blazed the great mills; and as I felt along, I remembered times when we’d put in by the tender sunset, as the rose faded out of the water and the orange ebbed down the west, and one by one the sweet evening-bells chimed forth, so clear and high, and each with a different tone, that it seemed as if the stars must flock, tinkling, into the sky.  And here were the bells ringing out again, ringing out of the gray and the gloom, dull and brazen, as if they rang from some cavern of shadows, or from the mouth of hell,—­but no, that was down-river!  Well, I made my way, and the men on the landing took up Dan, and helped him in and got him on my little bed, and no sooner there than the heavy sleep with which he had struggled fell on him like lead.

The story flew from mouth to mouth, the region rang with it; nobody had any need to add to it, or to make it out a griffin or a dragon that had gripped Faith and carried her off in his talons.  But everybody declared that those boats could be no ship’s yawls at all, but must belong to parties from up-river camping out on the beach, and that a parcel of such must have gone sailing with some of the hands of a sand-droger:  there was one in the stream now, that had got off with the tide, said the Jerdan boys, who’d been down there that afternoon, though there was no such name as “Flyaway” on her stern, and they were waiting for the master of her, who’d gone off on a spree,—­a dare-devil fellow, that used to run a smuggler between Bordeaux and Bristol, as they’d heard say:  and all agreed that Mr. Gabriel could never have had to do with them before that day, or he’d have known what a place a sand-droger would be for a woman; and everybody made excuses for Gabriel, and everybody was down on Faith.  So there things lay.  It was raw and chill when the last neighbor left us, the sky was black as a cloak, not a star to be seen, the wind had edged back to the east again and came in wet and wild from the sea and fringed with its thunder.  Oh, poor little Faith, what a night! what a night for her!