e than he; for they were human, and _could_ feel
it--could really know what jewel they had lost--had hearts to grieve
and eyes to weep with. He had nothing--was a stupid blank! Oh, he had
been mistaken about himself and his love: he was a stone.

A few moments later than his first sight of that silent crowd--moments
in which the world had changed and the sun had become a curse;
in which he had for some reason--not grief, for he could not
grieve--resolved on death, except in an event he dared not hope
for--he found himself speaking to the men who had borne up the beach
the thing whose germ of life, if it survived, was _his_ only chance
of life hereafter.

"I am a doctor; let me come." The place they had brought it to was a
timber structure that was held as common property by the fisher-world,
and known as Lloyd's Coffeehouse. It was not a coffeehouse, but
a kind of spontaneous club-room, where the old men sat and smoked
churchwarden pipes, and told each other tales of storm and wreck, and
how the news of old sea-battles came to St. Sennans in their boyhood;
of wives made widows for their country's good, and men all sound of
limb when the first gun said "Death!" across the water, crippled for
all time when the last said "Victory!" and there was silence and the
smell of blood. Over the mantel was an old print of the battle of
Camperdown, with three-deckers in the smoke, flanked by portraits of
Rodney and Nelson. There was a long table down the centre that had
been there since the days of Rodney, and on this was laid what an hour
ago was Sally; what each man present fears to uncover the face of, but
less on his own account than for the sake of the only man who seems
fearless, and lays hands on the cover to remove it; for all knew, or
guessed, what this dead woman might be--might have been--to this man.

"I am a doctor; let me come."

"Are ye sure ye know, young master? Are ye sure, boy?" The speaker,
a very old man, interposes a trembling hand to save Vereker from what
he may not anticipate, perhaps has it in mind to beseech him to give
place to the local doctor, just arriving. But the answer is merely, "I
know." And the hand that uncovers the dead face never wavers, and then
that white thing we see is all there is of Sally--that coil and tangle
of black hair, all mixed with weed and sea-foam, is the rich mass that
was drying in the sun that day she sat with Fenwick on the beach;
those eyes that strain behind the half-c