“Some one,” said Mrs. Alger, “ought to go for those children.”  On this it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children were, —­whether on the beach or in the woods.

“Was n’t that thunder, Grace?” asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.

“Yes,” said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward, and waiting tremulously for her mother’s next question.

“Where is Mrs. Maynard?”

“She is n’t back, yet.”

“Then,” said Mrs. Breen, “he really did expect rough weather.”

“He must,” returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.

“It’s a pity,” remarked her mother, “that you made them go.”

“Yes.”  She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window, searched the inexorable expanse of sea.  It had already darkened at the verge, and the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with their white, but there was no small boat in sight.

“If anything happened to them,” her mother continued, “I should feel terribly for you.”

“I should feel terribly for myself,” Grace responded, with her eyes still seaward.

“Where do you think they went?”

“I did n’t ask,” said the girl.  “I wouldn’t,” she added, in devotion to the whole truth.

“Well, it is all of the same piece,” said Mrs. Breen.  Grace did not ask what the piece was.  She remained staring at the dark wall across the sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of which she rejected.  She held herself in every way responsible,—­for doubting that poor young fellow’s word, and then for forcing that reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself to perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a little sail, which she knew for theirs, blew round the point.  It seemed to fly along just on the hither side of that mural darkness, skilfully tacking to reach the end of the-reef before the wall pushed it on the rocks.  Suddenly, the long low stretch of the reef broke into white foam, and then passed from sight under the black wall, against which the little sail still flickered.  The girl fetched a long, silent breath.  They were inside the reef, in comparatively smooth water, and to her ignorance they were safe.  But the rain would be coming in another moment, and Mrs. Maynard would be drenched; and Grace would be to blame for her death.  She ran to the closet, and pulled down her mother’s India-rubber cloak and her own, and fled out-of-doors, to be ready on the beach with the wrap, against their landing.  She met the other ladies on the stairs and in the hall, and they clamored at her; but she glided through them like something in a dream, and then she heard a shouting in her ear, and felt herself caught and held up against the wind.