hore again to get a little
ball of paper, but told me to sail the minute he returned. I don't
understand it, ma'am, for later the watch woke me to say Mr. Graham had
come."

"Good Lord," I groaned. "It was I, and not your father, who answered the
watch."

For several minutes we stared blankly into each other's faces, but it
was she who broke the deadly silence.

"We must hurry back," she calmly told him, adding with a nervous catch
in her breath: "What a joke on Daddy!"

"A scream of a joke," I muttered, "----one he'll roar over till
God-knows-when!"

"We can't go back, Miss Sylvia," the captain now said. "When our
mainsheet parted the boom gybed so hard that it opened a seam. It may
hold on this tack, and it may not, but we'd sink if the weather hit us
on the other side. So I'm making for Key West."

A suspicious quiver played over her lips as the big fellow turned and
went upstairs, and I began to hate myself rather cordially.

"Do you happen to have that--that ball of paper?" she asked, when the
threatened storm of tears had been controlled.

"No, I threw it down."

A look of terror came into her eyes as she gasped:

"Then he'll find it!"

"It won't matter if he does! You hadn't written anything on it!"

"Did you look on both sides of it?"

"I--I think so; of course, I must have. Did you write on the other
side?"

"I don't know which the other side is that you refer to," she answered
with some show of anger. "There were two sides, you know. Still, it
can't much matter now whether it had any sides or not."

This was very perplexing, the words no more so than the way she looked
at me while pronouncing them. Yet I hardly thought it should give her as
much concern as our leaky boat. The storm had grown worse, and more than
once she glanced anxiously at the portholes whose glass, over half the
time, were submerged by swirls of greenish water.

"It'll turn out all right," I said, gently. "And you mustn't be afraid
of this storm."

"I'm not afraid!"

"Yes, you are," I tenderly persisted, "but your skipper looks like a man
who'll bring us through."

"Your concern is most flattering," she frigidly replied. "But fear of
storms, and distress over the unhappiness one may be causing others, are
quite different phases of emotion."

"I stand corrected and rebuked," I humbly acknowledged. "Yet I want you
to know that my concern springs from a deeper source than flattery. I
want honestly to assure you----"