A few feet away the doctor was stripping the wet clothes from the rescued man and piling the dry coats over him to warm him back to life.  His emergency bag, handed in by Polhemus through the crack of the closed doors, had been opened, a bottle selected, and some spoonfuls of brandy forced down the sufferer’s throat.  He saw that the sea-water had not harmed him; it was the cordwood and wreckage that had crushed the breath out of him.  In confirmation he pointed to a thin streak of blood oozing from one ear.  The captain nodded, and continued chafing the man’s hands—­working with the skill of a surfman over the water-soaked body.  Once he remarked in a half-whisper—­so low that Jane could not hear him: 

“I ain’t sure yet, doctor.  I thought it was Bart when I grabbed him fust; but he looks kind o’ different from what I expected to see him.  If it’s him he’ll know me when he comes to.  I ain’t changed so much maybe.  I’ll rub his feet now,” and he kept on with his work of resuscitation.

Lucy’s straining ears had caught the captain’s words of doubt, but they gave her no hope.  She had recognized at the first glance the man of all others in the world she feared most.  His small ears, the way the hair grew on the temples, the bend of the neck and slope from the chin to the throat.  No—­she had no misgivings.  These features had been part of her life—­had been constantly before her since the hour Jane had told her of Bart’s expected return.  Her time had come; nothing could save her.  He would regain consciousness, just as the captain had said, and would open those awful hollow eyes and would look at her, and then that dreadful mouth, with its thin, ashen lips, would speak to her, and she could deny nothing.  Trusting to her luck—­something which had never failed her—­she had continued in her determination to keep everything from Max.  Now it would all come as a shock to him, and when he asked her if it was true she could only bow her head.

She dared not look at Archie—­she could not.  All her injustice to him and to Jane; her abandonment of him when a baby; her neglect of him since, her selfish life of pleasure; her triumph over Max—­ all came into review, one picture after another, like the unrolling of a chart.  Even while her hand was on Jane’s shoulder, and while comforting words fell from her lips, her mind and eyes were fixed on the face of the man whom the doctor was slowly bringing back to life.

Not that her sympathy was withheld from Archie and Jane.  It was her terror that dominated her—­ a terror that froze her blood and clogged her veins and dulled every sensibility and emotion.  She was like one lowered into a grave beside a corpse upon which every moment the earth would fall, entombing the living with the dead.

The man groaned and turned his head, as if in pain.  A convulsive movement of the lips and face followed, and then the eyes partly opened.

Lucy clutched at the coil of rope, staggered to her feet, and braced herself for the shock.  He would rise now, and begin staring about, and then he would recognize her.  The captain knew what was coming; he was even now planning in his mind the details of the horrible plot of which Jane had told her!