t's east."
The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the merit
of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded. The clouds
mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies disputed
whether they had heard thunder or not: a faction contended for the
bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over the
bridge just before you reached Jocelyn's. But those who were faithful to
the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash that broke over
the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills, left them deeply
silent.

"Some one," said Mrs. Alger, "ought to go for those children." On
this it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children
were,--whether on the beach or in the woods.

"Was n't that thunder, Grace?" asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by
which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.

"Yes," said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward,
and waiting tremulously for her mother's next question.

"Where is Mrs. Maynard?"

"She is n't back, yet."

"Then," said Mrs. Breen, "he really did expect rough weather."

"He must," returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.

"It's a pity," remarked her mother, "that you made them go."

"Yes." She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window, searched
the inexorable expanse of sea. It had already darkened at the verge, and
the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with their white,
but there was no small boat in sight.

"If anything happened to them," her mother continued, "I should feel
terribly for you."

"I should feel terribly for myself," Grace responded, with her eyes
still seaward.

"Where do you think they went?"

"I did n't ask," said the girl. "I wouldn't," she added, in devotion to
the whole truth.

"Well, it is all of the same piece," said Mrs. Breen. Grace did not ask
what the piece was. She remained staring at the dark wall across the
sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of
which she rejected. She held herself in every way responsible,--for
doubting that poor young fellow's word, and then for forcing that
reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce
insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself
to perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have
sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a
little sail, which she knew for theirs,