“Don’t expect ’em to tow the wreck ashore in this weather, do ye?” shouted Barlow.  “They’ve got the folks all safe enough.  I tell ye I see ’em!” he cried, at a wild look of doubt in her eyes.  “Run to the house, there, and get everything in apple-pie order.  There’s goin’ to be a chance for some of your doctor’n’ now, if ye know how to fetch folks to.”

It was the little house on the beach, which the children were always prying and peering into, trying the lock, and wondering what the boat was like, which Grace had seen launched.  Now the door yielded to her, and within she found a fire kindled in the stove, blankets laid in order, and flasks of brandy in readiness in the cupboard.  She put the blankets to heat for instant use, and prepared for the work of resuscitation.  When she could turn from them to the door, she met there a procession that approached with difficulty, heads down and hustled by the furious blast through which the rain now hissed and shot.  Barlow and one of the boat’s crew were carrying Mrs. Maynard, and bringing up the rear of the huddling oil-skins and sou’westers came Libby, soaked, and dripping as he walked.  His eyes and Grace’s encountered with a mutual avoidance; but whatever was their sense of blame, their victim had no reproaches to make herself.  She was not in need of restoration.  She was perfectly alive, and apparently stimulated by her escape from deadly peril to a vivid conception of the wrong that had been done her.  If the adventure had passed off prosperously, she was the sort of woman to have owned to her friend that she ought not to have thought of going.  But the event had obliterated these scruples, and she realized herself as a hapless creature who had been thrust on to dangers from which she would have shrunk.  “Well, Grace!” she began, with a voice and look before which the other quailed, “I hope you are satisfied!  All the time I was clinging to that wretched boat.  I was wondering how you would feel.  Yes, my last thoughts were of you.  I pitied you.  I did n’t see how you could ever have peace again.”

“Hold on, Mrs. Maynard!” cried Libby.  “There’s no, time for that, now.  What had best be done, Miss Green?  Had n’t she better be got up to the house?”

“Yes, by all means,” answered Grace.

“You might as well let me die here,” Mrs. Maynard protested, as Grace wrapped the blankets round her dripping dress.  “I ’m as wet as I can be, now.”

Libby began to laugh at these inconsequences, to which he was probably well used.  “You would n’t have time to die here.  And we want to give this hydropathic treatment a fair trial.  You’ve tried the douche, and now you’re to have the pack.”  He summoned two of the boatmen, who had been considerately dripping outside, in order to leave the interior to the shipwrecked company, and they lifted Mrs. Maynard, finally wrapped in, Grace’s India-rubber cloak, and looking like some sort of strange, huge chrysalis, and carried her out into the storm and up the steps.