up the
rear of the huddling oil-skins and sou'westers came Libby, soaked, and
dripping as he walked. His eyes and Grace's encountered with a mutual
avoidance; but whatever was their sense of blame, their victim had no
reproaches to make herself. She was not in need of restoration. She was
perfectly alive, and apparently stimulated by her escape from deadly
peril to a vivid conception of the wrong that had been done her. If the
adventure had passed off prosperously, she was the sort of woman to have
owned to her friend that she ought not to have thought of going. But
the event had obliterated these scruples, and she realized herself as a
hapless creature who had been thrust on to dangers from which she would
have shrunk. "Well, Grace!" she began, with a voice and look before
which the other quailed, "I hope you are satisfied! All the time I was
clinging to that wretched boat. I was wondering how you would feel. Yes,
my last thoughts were of you. I pitied you. I did n't see how you could
ever have peace again."

"Hold on, Mrs. Maynard!" cried Libby. "There's no, time for that, now.
What had best be done, Miss Green? Had n't she better be got up to the
house?"

"Yes, by all means," answered Grace.

"You might as well let me die here," Mrs. Maynard protested, as Grace
wrapped the blankets round her dripping dress. "I 'm as wet as I can be,
now."

Libby began to laugh at these inconsequences, to which he was probably
well used. "You would n't have time to die here. And we want to give
this hydropathic treatment a fair trial. You've tried the douche, and
now you're to have the pack." He summoned two of the boatmen, who had
been considerately dripping outside, in order to leave the interior to
the shipwrecked company, and they lifted Mrs. Maynard, finally wrapped
in, Grace's India-rubber cloak, and looking like some sort of strange,
huge chrysalis, and carried her out into the storm and up the steps.

Grace followed last with Mr. Libby, very heavyhearted and reckless. She
had not only that sore self-accusal; but the degradation of the affair,
its grotesqueness, its spiritual squalor, its utter gracelessness, its
entire want of dignity, were bitter as death in her proud soul. It was
not in this shameful guise that she had foreseen the good she was to do.
And it had all come through her own wilfulness and self-righteousness.
The tears could mix unseen with the rain that drenched her face, but
they blinded her, and half-wa