fog did not lift, and the _Scarrowmania_ plunged on through it with
spray-wet decks and the gray seas smashing about her bows. It was
bitterly cold and the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the voyage was
rapidly shortening.

One evening Agatha paced the deck with Wyllard. The girl was in a
strangely unsettled mood. Perhaps it was merely the gloom of the sea and
sky reacting upon her that caused her to look forward to the landing
with a certain half-conscious shrinking. They stopped by the rails
presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas that, tipped with livid
froth, rolled out of the sliding haze, and the dreariness of the
surroundings intensified the girl's depression. There was something
unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog that hid everything, for
Agatha had been troubled with a half-apprehensive longing to see what
lay before her. She noticed the lookout, a lonely, shapeless figure,
standing amid the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and by
she saw him turn and wave an arm toward the bridge behind her, and she
heard a hoarse cry. What it meant she could not tell, but in another
moment the _Scarrowmania's_ whistle shrieked.

A gray shape burst out of the vapor and grew with astonishing swiftness
into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of hull that
moved amid a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig under fore-course
and topsails, and as the girl watched the vessel it sank to the tilted
bowsprit, and a big gray and white sea foamed about the bows.

"Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.

Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more
the whistle gave a warning blast. It seemed that the two vessels could
hardly pass clear of each other.

Wyllard laid a hand upon Agatha's shoulder.

"The skipper's starboarding. We'll go around to the stern," he said.

His grasp was reassuring, and Agatha watched the straining curves of
canvas and the line of half-submerged hull. The brig rose with streaming
bows, swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with
bewildering suddenness into a belt of driving fog.

Agatha was not sure that there had been any peril, but it was certainly
past now, and she was rather puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had
held her shoulder. For one thing, she had felt instinctively that she
was safe with him. She decided not to trouble herself about the reason
for this, and presently she looked up at him. The expressio