elp."

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.

The girl had raised her head, and was pointing toward the sea. Then she
sprang to her feet with a scream.

"A man! A man! Save him!"

As she spoke a huge wave rolled in, and out of it struggled, on hands
and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up and around, and lay
clinging with outstretched arms over the edge of the rock.

"Save him!" she shrieked again, as twenty men rushed forward--and
stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them, but between
them and him stretched a long, ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, with
seething cauldrons within.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come,
half-burying the wretched mariner, and tearing across the chasm.

The schoolmistress took one long look, and as the wave retired, rushed
after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her knees.

"The wave has carried him across the crack, and she's got him!" screamed
old Willis. And he sprang upon her, and caught her round the waist.

"Now, if you be men!" shouted he, as the rest hurried down.

"Now, if you be men; before the next wave comes!" shouted big Jan, the
fisherman. "Hands together, and make a line!" And he took a grip with
one hand of the old man's waistband, and held out the other for who
would to seize.

Strong hand after hand was clasped, and strong knee after knee dropped
almost to the rock, to meet the coming rush of water.

It came, and surged over the man and the girl, and up to old Willis's
throat, and round the knees of Jan and his neighbour; and then followed
the returning out-dr