“What is it?” asked Miss Abbey.
“It’s summut run down in the fog, ma’am,” answered Bob. “There’s ever so many people in the river.”
“Tell ’em to put on all the kettles!” cried Miss Abbey. “See that the boiler’s full. Get a bath out. Hang some blankets to the fire. Heat some stone bottles. Have your senses about you, you girls downstairs, and use ’em.”
While Miss Abbey partly delivered these directions to Bob—whom she seized by the hair, and whose head she knocked against the wall, as a general injunction to vigilance and presence of mind—and partly hailed the kitchen with them—the company in the public room, jostling one another, rushed out to the causeway, and the outer noise increased.
“Come and look,” said Miss Abbey to her visitors. They all three hurried to the vacated public room, and passed by one of the windows into the wooden verandah overhanging the river.
“Does anybody down there know what has happened?” demanded Miss Abbey, in her voice of authority.
“It’s a steamer, Miss Abbey,” cried one blurred figure in the fog.
“It always is a steamer, Miss Abbey,” cried another.
“Them’s her lights, Miss Abbey, wot you see a-blinking yonder,” cried another.
“She’s a-blowing off her steam, Miss Abbey, and that’s what makes the fog and the noise worse, don’t you see?” explained another.