“It was not worth while disturbing your rest just to see us go off.  God bless you, Miss Lucy!  The Frenchman is bound for ——­, and will take you safe; and mind you don’t step ashore till the plank is fast.

Yours, respectfully,

“DAVID DODD.”

That was all.  She folded it back thoughtfully into the original folds, and turned away.  When she had gone but a few steps she stopped and put her rejected lover’s little note into her bosom, and went slowly back to the boat, hanging her sweet head, and crying as she went.

CHAPTER XX.

MR. FOUNTAIN remained in the town waiting for his niece’s return.  Six o’clock came—­no boat.  Eight o’clock—­no boat, and a heavy gale blowing.  He went down to the beach in great anxiety; and when he got there he soon found it was shared to the full by many human beings.  There were little knots of fishermen and sailors discussing it, and one poor woman, mother and wife, stealing from group to group and listening anxiously to the men’s conjectures.  But the most striking feature of the scene was an old white-haired man, who walked wildly, throwing his arms about.  The others rather avoided him, but Mr. Fountain felt he had a right to speak to him; so he came to him, and told him “his niece was on board; and you, too, I fear, have some one dear to you in danger.”

The old man replied sorrowfully that “his lovely new boat was in danger—­in such danger that he should never see her again;” then added, going suddenly into a fury, that “as to the two rascally bluejackets that were on board of her, and had borrowed her of his wife while he was out, all he wished was that they had been swamped to all eternity long ago, then they would not have been able to come and swamp his dear boat.”

Peppery old Fountain cursed him for a heartless old vagabond, and joined the group whose grief and anxiety were less ostentatious, being for the other boat that carried their own flesh and blood.  But all night long that white-haired old man paced the shore, flinging his arms, weeping and cursing alternately for his dear schooner.

Oh holy love—­of property! how venerable you looked in the moonlight, with your white hairs streaming!  How well you imitated, how close you rivaled, the holiest effusions of the heart, and not for the first time nor the last.

“My daughter! my ducats! my ducats! my daughter!” etc.

The morning broke; no sign of either boat.  The wind had shifted to the east, and greatly abated.  The fishermen began to have hopes for their comrades; these communicated themselves to Mr. Fountain.

It was about one o’clock in the afternoon when this latter observed people streaming along the shore to a distant point.  He asked a coastguard man, whom he observed scanning the place with a glass, “What it was?”

The man lowered his voice and said, “Well, sir, it will be something coming ashore, by the way the folk are running.”