Some time might elapse before a storm should arise, and longer still, it was to be hoped, before a wreck should call out the boat; but here it now was, ready for need, a possible ark of refuge for drowning sailors or passengers, no longer to be vainly cried for in a last despair.
Already a full crew had been enrolled, double the number actually needed to man the boat; and more than one practice had taken place, by way of getting their hands in. Old Adams had been appointed coxswain, with a fixed salary of eight pounds a year, with Robins for bowman at a salary of thirty shillings. There would also be regular additional payments; four shillings usually to each man of the crew, when they went afloat for exercise; ten shillings to each by day, and one pound to each by night, when going to save life, whether or no they were successful in the effort; and these sums would be increased by one-half during the winter months, from the beginning of October to the end of March.
Such and other expenses would be undertaken by the National Lifeboat Institution, out of its regular funds; but collections were to be made annually in the neighbourhood, managed by a small local committee, to do what might be possible in the way of helping to support their own lifeboat. All Maxham was delighted with this new possession, and certainly not least so the Vicar, who had had so much to do with getting it.
Mildred had lately been very hard at work, with her two helpers, Jessie and Mimy. She seemed always to have her hands more than full; and, indeed, she might easily have kept two or three more assistants employed. But this would have meant a change of abode, as no room in Periwinkle Cottage was large enough for more than three workers, spending many hours of the day together.
A fourth might sit with them occasionally, but not as a regular thing: and Mildred was not anxious to make a big concern of her dressmaking business. She preferred to undertake no more than she could herself cut out and properly overlook; and she did not at all wish to quit Miss Perkins' little house, which had become a home to her.
This afternoon she meant to treat herself to a lonely ramble; lonely, except for the companionship of Hero—and she never went for a walk without taking him. Hero had saved her life; and he was the one link which bound her present to her past life.
Everything and everybody else was new; dating not so far back as the shipwreck which had swept away her belongings. Hero alone had been in her former life. Much as Mildred cared for Jessie, and for other Old Maxham friends, not one of them could be to her what faithful Hero was; and she loved now and then to get away with him into the country, there to indulge in dreams of the past, which were not all sad, because they were mingled with dreams of the future.
Solitary as she might be in a sense, that solitariness was not for ever. Those who were gone she had not lost. They had only passed before her into the fairer Land. By-and-by she would join them there; and all her best hopes were anchored on that reunion. It helped her sometimes to pass out of reach of other people's chit-chat, and to lose herself in thought of the future.
"Come, Hero, we'll go through the fields," she said, speaking to the dog as to a friend of her own standing.
Hero always seemed to understand.