"This," whispered Brenda to Nesta, "is how we always were before Aunt Dorothy went away. Now you can see why we missed her."
The change was something like a fairy tale to the Bush children; every one seemed suddenly "magicked" into different beings. This, then, was home as mother had known it.
The story of Aunt Dorothy's rescue held the table spellbound; the very butler and footman forgot their duties as they listened.
It appeared that, having jumped into the water with Peter, Dorothy struck out as fast as possible to swim away from the ship, keeping a grip of the little fellow as best she could. But in the terrible commotion that occurred on the going down of the Cora she lost her grasp, and Peter was swept away from her into the inky blackness of the night.
She swam, floated, called, it seemed to her for ages, but all in vain, and at last, in a state of utter exhaustion, she gave herself up merely to the thought of keeping afloat. She must have been many hours in the water, but, losing consciousness after a while, her next experience was to find herself on board a vessel of some sort—a schooner it turned out to be on her way out to the reefs for bêche-de-mer fishing.
"Why, we saw her!" exclaimed Eustace. "Mother, that must have been the boat we saw far away out to sea. The captain of the station told us it was theirs."
"They must have picked me up soon after dawn, before the turn of the tide," said Aunt Dorothy. "I think when I came to my senses and saw the kind of people I was among, I was more frightened than I had been even by the wreck. Most of them were black-fellows—the rest I have since discovered were Portuguese; but not a soul in all that uncouth crowd could speak English or understand a word I said."
"It was pretty terrifying," Bob agreed.
"They therefore did not know where I came from, where I wanted to go, or anything about me. I kept imploring them to take me back to land; but this, though they must have understood my signs, they refused to do."
"What brutes!" exclaimed Herbert hotly.