And mother stopped, trembling like a leaf.

I’d been wiping and screwing the glass, and I’d waited a breath, for mother always talked so like a preacher; but when she’d finished, after a second or two Dan looked up, and said, as if he’d just come in—­

“Aunt Rhody! how come you out of bed?”

And then mother, she got upon the bed, and she took Dan’s head on her breast and fell to stroking his brows, laying her cool palms on his temples and on his eyelids, as once I’d have given my ears to do,—­and I slipped out of the room.

Oh, I hated to go up those stairs, to mount that ladder, to open the scuttle!  And once there, I waited and waited before I dared to look.  The night had unnerved me.  At length I fixed the glass.  I swept the broad swollen stream, to the yellowing woods, and over the meadows, where a pale transient beam crept under and pried up the hay-cocks,—­the smoke that began to curl from the chimneys and fall as soon,—­the mists blowing off from Indian Hill, but brooding blue and dense down the turnpike, and burying the red spark of the moon, that smothered like a half-dead coal in her ashes,—­anywhere, anywhere but that spot!  I don’t know why it was, but I couldn’t level the glass there,—­my arm would fall, my eye haze.  Finally I brought it round nearer and tried again.  Everywhere, as far as your eye could reach, the sea was yeasty and white with froth, and great streaks of it were setting up the inky river, and against it there were the twin light-houses quivering their little yellow rays as if to mock the dawn, and far out on the edge of day the great light at the Isles of Shoals blinked and blinked, crimson and gold, fainter and fainter, and lost at last.  It was no use, I didn’t dare point it, my hand trembled so I could see nothing plain, when suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into stillness.  The tube slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney, and there——­What was it in the field? what ghastly picture?

The glass crashed from my hand, and I staggered shrieking down the ladder.

The sound wasn’t well through my lips, when the door slammed, and Dan had darted out of the house and to the shore.  I after him.  There was a knot sitting and standing round there in the gray, shivering, with their hands in their pockets and their pipes set in their teeth; but the gloom was on them as well, and the pipes went out between the puffs.

“Where’s Dennis’s boat?” Dan demanded, as he strode.

“The six-oar’s all the one not”——­

“The six-oar I want.  Who goes with me?”

There wasn’t a soul in the ward but would have followed Dan’s lead to the end of the world and jumped off; and before I could tell their names there were three men on the thwarts, six oars in the air, Dan stood in the bows, a word from him, and they shot away.

I watched while I could see, and then in and up to the attic, forgetting to put mother in her bed, forgetting all things but the one.  And there lay the glass broken.  I sat awhile with the pieces in my hand, as if I’d lost a kingdom; then down, and mechanically put things to rights, and made mother comfortable,—­and she’s never stood on her feet from that day to this.  At last I seated myself before the fire, and stared into it to blinding.