“Where in land be you goin’, Miss Breen?”

Barlow, in a long, yellow oil-skin coat and sou’wester hat, kept pushing her forward to the edge of the cliff, as he asked.

“I’m going down to meet them!” she screamed.

“Well, I hope you will meet ’em.  But I guess you better go back to the house.  Hey?  WUNT?  Well; come along, then, if they ain’t past doctorin’ by the time they git ashore!  Pretty well wrapped up, any way!” he roared; and she perceived that she had put on her waterproof and drawn the hood over her head.

Those steps to the beach had made her giddy when she descended with leisure for such dismay; but now, with the tempest flattening her against the stair-case, and her gossamer clutching and clinging to every surface, and again twisting itself about her limbs, she clambered down as swiftly and recklessly as Barlow himself, and followed over the beach beside the men who were pulling a boat down the sand at a run.

“Let me get in!” she screamed.  “I wish to go with you!”

“Take hold of the girl, Barlow!” shouted one of the men.  “She’s crazy.”

He tumbled himself with four others into the boat, and they all struck out together through the froth and swirl of the waves.  She tried to free herself from Barlow, so as to fling the waterproof into the boat.  “Take this, then.  She’ll be soaked through!”

Barlow broke into a grim laugh.  “She won’t need it, except for a windin’-sheet!” he roared.  “Don’t you see the boat’s drivin’ right on t’ the sand?  She’ll be kindlin’ wood in a minute.”

“But they’re inside the reef!  They can come to anchor!” she shrieked in reply.  He answered her with a despairing grin and a shake of the head.  “They can’t.  What has your boat gone out for, then?”

“To pick ’em up out the sea.  But they’ll never git ’em alive.  Look how she slaps her boom int’ the water!  Well!  He does know how to handle a boat!”

It was Libby at the helm, as she could dimly see, but what it was in his management that moved Barlow’s praise she could not divine.  The boat seemed to be aimed for the shore, and to be rushing, head on, upon the beach; her broad sail was blown straight out over her bow, and flapped there like a banner, while the heavy boom hammered the water as she rose and fell.  A jagged line of red seamed the breast of the dark wall behind; a rending crash came, and as if fired upon, the boat flung up her sail, as a wild fowl flings up its wing when shot, and lay tossing keel up, on the top of the waves.  It all looked scarcely a stone’s cast away, though it was vastly farther.  A figure was seen to drag itself up out of the sea, and fall over into the boat, hovering and pitching in the surrounding welter, and struggling to get at two other figures clinging to the wreck.  Suddenly the men in the boat pulled away, and Grace uttered a cry of despair and reproach:  “Why, they’re leaving it, they’re leaving it!”