es were
crying all about them. They sprang to their feet to hear the
sailing-master's shout as one beholds lightning fall out of a blue
sky: "See your halyards all clear for running."

"Ay, ay, sir!" came the ringing answer.

"Stand by your halyards and down-hauls."

"Ay, ay, sir!"

"Haul down the flying jib: take the bonnet off the jib, and put a reef
in her," came the strong swift sentences. "Brail up the foresail, and
double reef the mainsail."

There was a sound far, far off, like a mighty rush of waters, coming
nearer and swelling to a roar--an awful roar of winds and waves. And
Helen was wildly clasping Reyburn, who was plunging with her down the
companion-way.

"Here she comes!" cried the captain. "Hold on all!" And then there was
a shock that threw them prostrate, a writhing and twisting of every
plank beneath them, and the tornado had struck the yacht and knocked
her on her beam-ends.

"Cut away the weather rigging!" they heard the captain thunder through
all the rout before they had once tried to regain themselves. The
quick, sharp blows resounded across the beating of the billow and the
shrieking of the wind and cloud. "Stand clear, all!" and with a crash
as if the heavens were coming together the masts had gone by the
board, and what there was left of the Beachbird had righted and now
rolled a wreck in the trough of the sea.

A half hour's work, but it had done more than wreck a ship: it had
wrecked a passion. For as Helen still clung round Reyburn, sobbing and
screaming, he had seen the opposite door open, and Lilian landing
there, white-robed, white-shawled, with her bright hair about her face
as white as a spirit's. "John," she said, "we are in a hurricane."

"Yes, Lilian," he had answered from where he was stationed close
beside her door. "But the worst must be over. The wind already abates,
and as soon as the sea goes down--"

As he spoke there came the terrible cry, loud above all other clamor,
"A leak! a leak!" and then followed the renewed trampling of feet
overhead, and the hoarse wheeze of the pumps.

"We are going down," Lilian said, and turned that white face away.
"Oh, John!, before we go forgive me," she cried; and John held his
outstretched arms toward her and folded her within them.

Reyburn saw it, and even in that supreme moment, when life and death
swung in the balance, an awful revulsion seized him. He beheld now
with a sickening shudder the woman cowering at his feet whos