“I beg pardon for speaking so freely to you, ma’am,” she went on after a short pause, while Lucy’s tears dropped; “but there’s a look in your face that if you’d been a man would have sent you out to the Goodwins. But the women have to do their part at home—keeping ready dry clothes and hot gruel sometimes,” she added with a quiet laugh, “as we did one day this spring, when one poor soul was left wrecked on the Goodwins after all his shipmates were drowned. It was said the lifeboat couldn’t go out; but then our men they couldn’t stay in! Never shall I forget that night at the little mariners’ service where I often go. The gentleman that was praying and reading the Scriptures saw the men’s faces, and he broke short off to say, ‘Can we go? Can we do something?’ Why not? It was all in the service of God. And they went, and they brought off the man safely—a poor Norwegian.” Lucy had learned to fear contact with strangers since her husband’s illness. Their misjudged “sympathy,” their well-meant comments, had so often been as the rubbing of salt into the ever-open wound of anxiety, and the almost tenderer spot of hope. She had learned the lesson that if the greatest consolation for sorrow is to have beside us one who understands it and shares it, then the next greatest blessing is to be able to bear one’s burden alone, apart from those to whom one’s agony is but a spectacle or a dumping ground for commonplaces. But she found there was no need to shrink from Mrs. May. When she confided to the landlady the plans that were in preparation, and the long separation which was impending, Mrs. May was full of encouraging hope. She could narrate cases in which the sea, despite its terrible side, had acted as a beneficent healer and life restorer. She could tell, too, of many who had suffered in the same way as Mr. Challoner, and were still alive—elderly people, with long useful years behind them. To Lucy Challoner this sort of cheer was the more acceptable because it came to her surrounded by an atmosphere, and supported by a foundation, in which neither life nor death were held to be the main things—but only “the will of the Lord,” which could make either death or life blessed both to those who were left and to those who were taken.