“Give my jewelry and things to Bess’s baby!” I found strength to call back.  What with the wallowing of the steamer and the natural instability of rope-ladders I seemed a mere atom tossed about in a swaying, reeling universe. What will Aunt Jane do? flashed through my mind, and I wished I had waited to see.  Then the arms of the Honorable Mr. Vane received me.  The strong rowers bent their backs, and the boat shot out over the mile or two of bright water between us and the island.  Great slow swells lifted us.  We dipped with a soothing, cradle-like motion.  I forgot to be afraid, in the delight of the warm wind that fanned our cheeks, of the moonbeams that on the crest of every ripple were splintered to a thousand dancing lights.  I forgot fear, forgot Miss Higglesby-Browne, forgot the harshness of the Scotch character.

“Oh, glorious, glorious!” I cried to Cuthbert Vane.

“Not so dusty, eh?” he came back in their ridiculous English slang.  Now an American would have said some little old moon that!  We certainly have our points of superiority.

All around the island white charging lines of breakers foamed on ragged half-seen reefs.  You saw the flash of foam leaping half the height of the black cliffs.  The thunder of the surf was in our ears, now rising to wild clamor, fierce, hungry, menacing, now dying to a vast broken mutter.  Now our boat felt the lift of the great shoreward rollers, and sprang forward like a living thing.  The other boat, empty of all but the rowers and returning from the island to the ship, passed us with a hail.  We steered warily away from a wild welter of foam at the end of a long point, and shot beyond it on the heave of a great swell into quiet water.  We were in the little bay under the shadow of the frowning cliff’s.

At the head of the bay, a quarter of a mile away, lay a broad white beach shining under the moon.  At the edge of dark woods beyond a fire burned redly.  It threw into relief the black moving shapes of men upon the sand.  The waters of the cove broke upon the beach in a white lacework of foam.

Straight for the sand the sailors drove the boat.  She struck it with a jar, grinding forward heavily.  The men sprang overboard, wading half-way to the waist.  And the arms of the Honorable Cuthbert Vane had snatched me up and were bearing me safe and dry to shore.

The sailors hauled on the boat, dragging it up the beach, and I saw the Scotchman lending them a hand.  The hard dry sand was crunching under the heels of Mr. Vane.  I wriggled a little and Apollo, who had grown absent-minded apparently, set me down.

Mr. Shaw approached and the two men greeted each other in their offhand British way.  As we couldn’t well, under the circumstances, maintain a fiction of mutual invisibility, Mr. Shaw, with a certain obvious hesitation, turned to me.

“Only lady passenger, eh?  Hope you’re not wet through.  Cookie’s making coffee over yonder.”