Not a word was said, for the boys had no voice left to make themselves heard. The last shout of joy to Beauty had left them spent and faint. The stranger, surprised at the smallness and feebleness of the hand he now let go, gently pushed the boy aside and took his place. Edwin leaned against the front of the cart beside his brother, dead beat and scarcely conscious of anything but a halo of happiness radiating from the blessed consciousness which found expression in a murmured, "Cuth, old boy, we've done it."
The reins fell slack on Beauty's neck, but the good horse needed no guiding. He seemed aware that two more men got up into the cart, and when a pause followed he gave his proud head a triumphant toss, and brought them up out of the water. There were three men in the cart and twice as many more holding on by the rope.
Audrey ran down from the dying fire to meet them.
A strange, unnatural kind of twilight, a something weird and ghastly, belonging to neither day nor night, seemed to pervade the land, and shed a sepulchral gleam across the men's pale faces. Audrey pushed open the door of the hut and beckoned to the sailors to enter.
They gathered round her, shaking the salt water from their dripping garments, and uttering broken exclamations of surprise and thankfulness. She saw a boy in the midst of the group limping painfully. As she hurried up to his assistance, she discovered that it was neither Edwin nor Cuthbert; but he grasped her outstretched hand so thankfully she could not withdraw it. There was a wildness in the alarm with which she began to ask them for her brothers the men could not mistake. They gave the forlorn girl an almost unanimous assurance that they knew nothing of her brothers. For the men clinging to the rope had not seen the boys in the cart. "But," added one heartily, "we'll protect you, for there is wild work afoot somewhere to-night. We have heard the cannonading, broadside after broadside, or we should not have gone rock-hunting in the dark. It is fool's work—you can give it no better name—coasting along a dangerous shore, with a sky too black for moon or star to penetrate."
"Yon's the little maid who fed the beacon," said another. "I saw her move across the front of the fire and throw her sticks upon it. God bless her! Every minute I thought we should see her blown over into the sea."
"Not me, not me," interposed poor Audrey.
Getting free in her desperation, and pressing between the sailors, she ran towards Beauty, who was slowly lagging round to the back of the hut.
"If my brothers are missing," she cried, "they must have been washed out of the cart." She clasped her hands before her eyes to shut out the sight of the drowning boys which imagination was picturing, and so failed to perceive the two weary heads leaning against the side of the cart. It was but a moment of agony, one of the unfounded alarms which always cluster round a real danger and follow the shock of dread like its shadow.
"Edwin, Edwin! where are you?" she cried.—"Cuthbert, Cuthbert! come to me!"