Lucy had watched the sailors of the barque gather in the confusion of studding-sails until the vessel looked as trim and fit aloft as need be; she had also watched the passage of the _Phoebe's_ boat to the frigate, and its return to the barque with one man more, whose position on board she could not imagine, neither that nor the reason for his being fetched. The man-of-war lay near, rolling languidly, lifting her copper sheathing on fire with wet sunshine, pointing her guns at the sea as the bright buttons of her trucks described arcs upon the blue sky like the flight of meteors in the velvet deeps of night. But now at half-past four the girl seemed to witness a commotion on board the barque. A man went aloft to the main-yard arm, and another to the fore-yard arm, and some one standing upon the quarterdeck of the _Minorca_, in a voice by which she guessed him to be Mr Fellowes, hailed the schooner, and requested Captain Weaver to send whips aloft to hoist a sick man in a litter aboard. Lucy, having sought in vain for any signs of Mr Lawrence or her father, or the Admiral on board the _Minorca_, ran to Captain Acton's cabin and tried to see the barque through his glass. Unfortunately she could not use both hands; she needed one to keep her eye shut; therefore, when she balanced the glass upon the rail, the rolling of the schooner caused the object she tried to see to slide up and down in the lens like a toy monkey on a stick in the hands of a child. However, with her unhelped vision, she presently saw a something resembling the short stage which is slung over a ship's side for men to stand upon to paint, or do carpentry work, float from the deck of the barque to a certain elevation between the fore and main-yard-arms, where tackles or whips had been rigged; she then perceived this something slowly descend into the man-of-war's boat alongside, into which, immediately afterwards, some figures tumbled from the flight of steps at the gangway, and the boat made for the schooner. As the little craft rapidly approached, swept onwards by six powerful oarsmen, Lucy quickly began to distinguish the inmates who, in the stern sheets or aft, consisted of the Admiral, Mr Fellowes, and a stranger. She could also see what resembled a stretcher lying with its head upon the aftermost thwart and the heel upon an unoccupied space in the stern sheets. The girl trembled, and wondered, and stared. Where was her father? Who was the sick man? Where was Mr Lawrence? The boat drew alongside, but not until the arrangement of plank and mattress upon which lay Mr Lawrence had been swayed over the rail of the schooner, and softly and tenderly lowered on to the deck, did she know that the sick man in the ship's litter was the lover whose passion for her had defied the gibbet in its unscrupulous, reckless, daring, headlong determination to achieve.