Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long, curved, black line, amid the white, wild leaping hills of water. A murmur from the crowd.
"A Liverpool clipper, by the lines of her."
"God help the poor passengers, then!" sobs a woman. "They're past our help."
A quarter of an hour passes.
"God have mercy!" shouts Brown. "She's going!"
The black curve coils up, and then all melts away into the white seething waste.
The coastguard lieutenant settles down in his macintoshes, knowing that his duty is not to leave as long as there is a chance of saving--not a life, for that was past all hope, but a chest of clothes or a stick of timber.
And with the coastguardsmen many sailors stayed. Old Captain Willis stays because Grace Harvey, the village schoolmistress, is there, sitting upon a flat slope of rock, a little apart from the rest, with her face resting on her hands, gazing intently out into the wild waste.
"She's not one of us," says old Willis. "There's no saying what's going on there in her. Maybe she's praying; maybe she sees more than we do, over the sea there."
"Look at her now! What's she after?" Brown replies.