The little girls had often caused the older ones anxiety; they had been lost; they had got into mischief that might have proved dangerous; but this situation seemed far and away more terrible than anything that had previously happened to the Corner House girls.
Tess and Dot had drifted away once in a boat at Pleasant Cove, but Tom Jonah, the faithful, had then been in their company. Now they were adrift on an unknown sea, in the dark, and with a hundred perils threatening them. Ruth felt that never before had her little sisters been in such danger while she was unable to lift a finger to help them.
She scarcely touched the food placed before her. Even Luke could not comfort Ruth Kenway now. In her mind continually danced possibilities of disaster for the two children who, since their mother’s death, she had attended so closely.
Her early duties as “little mother” had made Ruth seem really older than her years. Her thoughtfulness for her three sisters had made her different from other girls. Agnes often declared that Ruth “couldn’t have any fun” because of the duties that took first place in her mind and in her life.
The release from care that had been joined with the coming of the four Kenways and their Aunt Sarah Maltby to the Corner House in Milton had not entirely erased from Ruth’s mind certain remembrances connected with their previous poverty in Bloomsburg. This fact, perhaps, made her all the more charitable and thoughtful for other people’s troubles.
And now the occasion called up in the older girl’s mind the most doleful thoughts and surmises. What might not happen to Tess and Dot out on the sea in that unmanageable boat?
Ruth Kenway retired to the tent and nobody but Agnes followed to comfort her. And Agnes was not much of a comforter. She gave way too easily to her own despair to be of help to her sister.
The latter heard Mr. Howbridge and the boys talking together over the embers of the fire long after Agnes had fallen into a restless sleep. For her own part, Ruth could not sleep. She could not even close her eyes.
The question which she knew was discussed by her three companions outside her tent before they rolled up in their blankets was the question that fretted persistently the girl’s mind: How to reach Tess and Dot on the drifting boat?
If it was still adrift! Suppose it had crashed upon some rock—some island shore? Suppose the Isobel had really been wrecked at last? A hole stove in her hull, perhaps, and the craft even now sinking with the helpless children upon it?