The look of the Bar, when they reached it, struck chill even to Rachael’s heart.  In the clear tunnels of light flung from the car lamps it seemed all a moving level of restless water smitten under sheets of rain.  Anything more desperate than an effort to find the little belt of safety in this trackless spread of merciless seas it would be hard to imagine.  At an ordinary high tide the Bar was but a few inches above the sea; now, with a wind blowing, a heavy rain falling, and the tide almost at the full, no road whatever was visible.  It was there, the friendly road that Rachael and the hot and sandy boys had tramped a hundred times, but even she could not believe it, now, so utterly impassable did the shifting surface appear.

But she gallantly put the car straight into the heart of it, moving as slowly as the engine permitted, and sending quick, apprehensive glances into the darkness as she went.

“At the worst, we can back out of this, Millie,” said she.

“Of course we can,” Millie said, suppressing frightened tears with some courage.

The water was washing roughly against the running boards; to an onlooker the car would have had the appearance of being afloat, hub-deep, at sea.

Slowly, slowly, slowly they were still moving.  The car stopped short.  The engine was dead.  Rachael touched her starter, touched it again and again.  No use.  The car had stopped.  The rain struck in noisy sheets against the curtains.  The sea gurgled and rushed about them.  Derry moaned softly.

And now the full madness of the attempted expedition struck her for the first time.  She had never thought that, at worst, she could not go back.  What now?  Should they stand here on the shifting sand of the Bar until the tide fell—­it was not yet full.  Rachael felt her heart beating quick with terror.  It began to seem like a feverish dream.

Neither maid spoke, perhaps neither one realized the full extent of the calamity.  With the confidence of those who do not understand the workings of a car, they waited to have it start again.

But both girls screamed when suddenly a new voice was heard.  Rachael, starting nervously as a man’s figure came about the car out of the black night, in the next second saw, with a great rush of relief, that it was Ruddy Simms.  He was a mighty fellow, devoted to the Gregorys.  He proceeded rather awkwardly to explain that he hadn’t liked to think of their trying to cross the Bar, and so had come with them on the running board.

“Oh, Ruddy, how grateful I am to you!” Rachael said.  “Perhaps you can go back and get us a tow?  What can we do?”

“Stuck?” asked Ruddy, wading as unconcernedly about the car as if the sun were shining on the scene.

“No, I don’t think so, not yet.  But I can feel the road under us giving already.  And I’ve killed my engine!”

Ruddy deliberated.

“Won’t start, eh?”