“Declare,” said the hostess, more than once, “dunt see what we’s all thinkin’ of not to git over to Clark’s Hills ’fore the bar was under water!  They’ve got sixty-foot elevation there!”

“I’d just as soon try to get there now,” said Miss Stokes of New York eagerly.

“There’s waves eight feet high washin’ over that bar,” Ernest Barwick said, and something in the simple words made little Miss Stokes look sick for a moment.

“What’s our elevation?” Rachael asked.

“’Bout—­” Mr. Barwick paused.  “But you can’t tell nothing by that,” he contented himself with remarking after a moment’s thought.

“But I never heard—­I never heard of the sea coming right over a whole village!” Rachael hated herself for the fear that dragged the words out, and the white lips that spoke them.

“Neither did I!” said half a dozen voices.  There was silence while the old clock on the mantel wheezed out a lugubrious eight strokes.  “Lord, how it rains!” muttered Emily Barwick.

Nine o’clock—­ten o’clock.  The young women, the old woman, the maid and man who would be married some day if they lived, the husband and wife who had been lovers like them only a few years ago, and who now had these three little lives to guard, all sat wrapped in their own thoughts.  Rachael sat staring at the stove’s red eye, thinking, thinking, thinking.  She thought of Warren Gregory; his steamer must be in now, he must be with his mother in the old house, and planning to see her any day.  To-morrow—­if there was a to-morrow—­might bring his telegram.  What would his life be if he might never see her again?  She could not even leave him a note, or a word; on this eve of their meeting, were they to be parted forever?  Should she never tell him how dearly—­how dearly—­she loved him?  Tears came to her eyes, her heart was wrung with exquisite sorrow.

She thought of Billy—­poor little Billy—­who had never had a mother, who needed a mother so sadly, and of her own mother, dead now, and of the old blue coat of thirteen years ago, and the rough blue hat.  She thought of her great-grandmother in the little whitewashed California cottage under the shadow of the blue mountains, with the lilacs and marigolds in the yard.  And colored by her new great love, and by the solemn fears of this endless night, Rachael found a tenderness in her heart for all those shadowy figures that had played a part in her life.

At midnight there came a thundering crash on the ocean side of the house.

“Oh, God, it’s the sea!” screamed Emily Barwick.  They all rushed to the door and flung it open, and in a second were out in the wild blackness of the night.  Still the roaring and howling and shrieking of the elements, still the infuriated booming of the surf, but—­thank God—­no new sound.  There was no break in the flying darkness above them; the street was a running sheet of water in the dark.