“Mother! mother, dear!” He never left his office when she was at home and awake without telling her where he was going.

No one answered.

“She is asleep.  I will slip out without waking her.  Stay where you are, Rex—­I will be back some time before daylight,” and throwing his night-cloak about his shoulders, he started for his gig.

The dog stopped with his paws resting on the outer edge of the top step of the porch, the line he was not to pass, and looked wistfully after the doctor.  His loneliness was to continue, and his poor master to go out into the night alone.  His tail ceased to wag, only his eyes moved.

Once outside Doctor John patted the mare’s neck as if in apology and loosened the reins.  “Come, old girl,” he said; “I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped,” and springing into the gig, he walked the mare clear of the gravel beyond the gate, so as not to rouse his mother, touched her lightly with the whip, and sent her spinning along the road on the way to Fogarty’s.

The route led toward the sea, branching off within the sight of the cottage porch, past the low, conical ice-houses used by the fishermen in which to cool their fish during the hot weather, along the sand-dunes, and down a steep grade to the shore.  The tide was making flood, and the crawling surf spent itself in long shelving reaches of foam.  These so packed the sand that the wheels of the gig hardly made an impression upon it.  Along this smooth surface the mare trotted briskly, her nimble feet wet with the farthest reaches of the incoming wash.

As he approached the old House of Refuge, black in the moonlight and looking twice its size in the stretch of the endless beach, he noticed for the hundredth time how like a crouching woman it appeared, with its hipped roof hunched up like a shoulder close propped against the dune and its overhanging eaves but a draped hood shading its thoughtful brow; an illusion which vanished when its square form, with its wide door and long platform pointing to the sea, came into view.

More than once in its brief history the doctor had seen the volunteer crew, aroused from their cabins along the shore by the boom of a gun from some stranded vessel, throw wide its door and with a wild cheer whirl the life-boat housed beneath its roof into the boiling surf, and many a time had he helped to bring back to life the benumbed bodies drawn from the merciless sea by their strong arms.

There were other houses like it up and down the coast.  Some had remained unused for years, desolate and forlorn, no unhappy ship having foundered or struck the breakers within their reach; others had been in constant use.  The crews were gathered from the immediate neighborhood by the custodian, who was the only man to receive pay from the Government.  If he lived near by he kept the key; if not, the nearest fisherman held it.  Fogarty, the father of the sick child, and whose cabin was within gunshot of this house, kept the key this year.  No other protection was given these isolated houses and none was needed.  These black-hooded Sisters of the Coast, keeping their lonely vigils, were as safe from beach-combers and sea-prowlers as their white-capped namesakes would have been threading the lonely suburbs of some city.