necessary
for Miss Panney to do something. She walked up the beach, but not toward
the ring of people that had now formed around the fourth unfortunate. She
must quiet herself a little first.

Suddenly the old lady raised her hands and clasped them. It was a usual
gesture when she thought of something she ought to do.

"If it is one of them," she said to herself, "he ought to know it
instantly! And even if it isn't, he ought to know. They will be in a
terrible state; somebody should be here, and Herbert has gone to the
mountains. There is no one else." She now began to walk more rapidly.
"Yes," she said, speaking aloud in the intensity of her emotion, "he
ought to come, anyway. I can't be left here to take any chances. And if
he does not know immediately, he cannot get here today."

She now directed her steps toward one of the hotels, where she knew there
was a telegraph office.

"No matter what has happened, or what has not happened," she said to
herself as she hurried along, "he ought to be here, and he must come!"

The old lady's hand trembled a good deal as she wrote a telegram to Ralph
Haverley, but the operator at the window could read it. It ran: "A
dreadful disaster here. Come on immediately."

When she had finished this business, Miss Panney stood for a few moments
on the broad piazza of the hotel, which was deserted, for almost
everybody was on the beach. In spite of her agitation a grim smile came
over her face.

"Perhaps that was a little strong," she thought, "but it has gone now.
And no matter how he finds things, I can prove to him he is needed. I do
not believe he will be too much frightened; men never are, and I will see
to it that he has a blessed change in his feelings when he gets here."

Miss Panney was now allowing to enter her mind the conviction, previously
denied admittance, that no one of her three friends would be likely to be
swimming far from shore with a party of men. And, having thus restored
herself to something of her usual composure, she went down to the beach
to find out who had been drowned. On the way she met Mrs. Bannister and
the two girls, and from them she got her information that two of the
persons were believed to be beyond any power of resuscitation, and one of
these was a young lady from Boston.

CHAPTER XXXVII

LA FLEUR ASSUMES RESPONSIBILITIES

It was toward the middle of the afternoon that the good La Fleur sat
upon a bench under a tree by the side of