On the beach, about an hour after this, shapeless black things were driven up by the spume and the rush of the waves, and these were quickly seized by the hands of the ready fishermen who had been attracted to the spot. Antony himself was there, in fear and trembling lest one of the bodies washed in might be--oh, terrible!--Lotty's own. * * * * * Bob Stevens was a hard, rosy-faced man, bold and blue-eyed, strong in muscle, without one superfluous ounce of fat. Those eyes of his had peered into the darkness overcanopying many a stormy sea, those hard brown hands were at home with either tiller or oar, and more than at home with tack or sheet; a fisherman by trade, a sailor bold as ever trod a slippery deck, and master of the B---- lifeboat. Bob had gone quietly into the bar-parlour of the 'Lovat Arms' on that evening, with three of his pals, all life-boatmen, and they were smoking and enjoying modest glass and yarn when a man in oilskins rushed hurriedly in. 'Bob, you'll be wanted,' he said. 'There's a ship on the Partan Rocks.' 'God help her if she's there to-night!' said one of Bob's crew. 'Up with your drams, lads, and we'll get the _Maiden_ out at once.' In an almost incredibly short space of time, and just as the second red rocket cleft the darkness of the sky, the _Maiden_ was launched and standing out to sea. So quickly had they gone that the men's wives knew nothing of their going until they had made good their offing and were swallowed up in the dark o' the neap. The _Maiden_ could sail as close to the wind as any boat on the coast; but it needed all her seaworthiness and all Bob's skill to-night to battle with these fierce and seething seas. Never in this world will all the brave deeds done by our British lifeboats' crews be recorded. Perhaps--_quien sabe?_--their stories may be told on the shores of the Heavenly Canaan, where it is to be hoped we shall all meet. But now, through the darkness, the ocean lit up by the white of the curling waves, the _Maiden_ toils on, up the watery hills, down with a rush into the vales between, hit, buffeted, overwhelmed, and shivering, but still striving on and on and on. Will she be in time? Perhaps hardly not, for the last rocket has been fired, and out of the goodly crew of seventeen men and a boy that left London but two weeks ago only nine are now alive. The rest have been swept away into the black, yawning seas, and washed shorewards to death on the turn of the tide. Lotty is down below, for here is the captain's wife and baby, whom the little gipsy lass is doing her best to comfort. And she is thus engaged when her quick ear is sensible of knocking and scraping along the leeside bulwarks, and presently she cries aloud with joy, her eyes sparkling, her face sweetly flushed in the light of the lamp in gimbals.