The sea rolling inward swept us toward shore. It was well that I had taken precaution to pass the painter about her waist and tied the lashing securely. For by means of it she regained the overturned boat and climbing up clung to its keel in comparative safety for the moment. I, on the contrary, was driven landward and away from her. I struggled desperately, half-dazed, to regain the boat. I might better have attempted other things, but to see my shipmate there on the overturned boat, so drenched and forlorn, maddened me, and I fought flooding tide and flooding sea to reach her.

I could not call out, I was too spent and breathless for that, but I struggled on and on. Whatever the cause, the wave which had so nearly undone us was followed by a succession of the hugest rollers I have ever seen. Usually the waters inside such reefs as we had passed are smooth and calm, but on that day they were scarcely less rough than the ocean. To attempt to make head against them was vain.

I know now that my lady called to me to desist, seeing from her more elevated position on the boat’s keel that we were rapidly being driven toward a strip of sandy beach. But I did not hear. I did not become aware of our nearness to the shore until my foot actually touched bottom.

The next wave carried me landward and left me prostrate on the sand. I scrambled to my feet and leaped to meet the boat, also being rolled toward the beach.

“Then she bent over me.�

Mistress Lucy had cast off the lashing and had let herself into the water, and none too soon, for the capsized boat, I think her mast catching on the bottom, was suddenly righted by the waves, the mast carrying away, and before I could avoid it I was struck by the prow and knew no more.

By this time, as I afterward learned, my brave shipmate had got to her feet in the shallows. She saw the boat hurled upon me, saw me borne backward on the beach, saw me carried up the sand, and left lying senseless by the spent wave.

With feelings which she did not attempt to describe until long after, she ran to me, and with a strength, the source of which she could not explain, dragged me further up the beach. I am a large man and with all my inertness and the weight of my sodden clothes, I know not how she compassed it.

Then she bent over me. I did not ask her what she said or did until she chose to tell me later of her own will, but I presently awoke to find her looking into my face, holding my shoulders with her hands and frantically calling me by name.