She stretched out her hands to
him,--whether for help, or to say good-bye, he never knew.

He made no sign in reply. Her face was turned to him, not heeding the
death at her feet,--the thin face set in its iron-gray hair, with the
beauty of all those years of love upon it, the same wistful smile on it
with which it looked at him across the fire on winter evenings;--and he
was to sit there, unmanned, impotent, helpless, to watch the slow death
creep up to her lips, her eyes?

He lifted one hand feebly to his chest, with a dull hope of crushing out
the faint life beating uselessly there; then, with a desperate clutch on
the sand, struggled towards the water.

"I go to swim! Sharley! Sharley!" he cried, and that was all.

The morning dawned, bleak and blue; the thin light came into the cracks
of a wrecker's hut, colder than even on the sea. Jacobus had made a heap
of ropes and driftwood on which to lay his dead. He sat holding her head
on his breast, having twisted up her wet hair in a vain effort to adjust
it as she liked it best. There was no wild vagueness in his eyes, such
as dimmed them sometimes over his books; it was a grave, simple,
reasonable face that bent over this cold and unanswering one. It seemed
as if this one great blow, which God had given, had struck out from his
life all its vain vagaries and dreams.

Lufflin and one or two fishermen stood by, looking on; and outside he
heard women's voices, in shrill whispers, and a sob now and then.

"I want to carry her in the shore farther," he said, looking up
impatiently. "I will not have her vexed by these sounds of trouble."

"Yes, yes," said Lufflin, soothingly. "But you forget, dear Sir, she's
beyond all reach of pain now. Sorrow and tears cannot come near her
again."

"I don't know," said Jacobus,--"she has a quick ear for any cry of
trouble,"--holding the thin, blue-veined hand in his, and looking at it
with a face which made old Lufflin turn away.

"She be at rest now, yer woman," piped George Cathcart, in true
class-meeting twang. "Not all yer cries, nor the cries of the sea,
neyther, 'u'd wake her. Glory be to God!"

Jacobus looked from one to the other, his sickly frame in a heat of
inarticulate rage. That these boors, that death itself, should come
between him and his wife and say she could not hear his lightest word!

"Why, it's Lotty!"--in a whisper, hugging the stiff body closer, looking
up to Lufflin. "Dead or alive, it's my wife. It's