ules had rescued Tania and herself.

Thought travels swifter than anything else in the created world. So
Madge's thoughts had reached the upper world before she followed them.
She wondered if the girls would be very sadly disappointed when she
returned bearing, instead of a costly pearl, nothing but a rusted iron
box!

Would Phil have better luck when she descended to the depths of the bay?
What had happened in the outside world since she had disappeared from it
a long, long time ago?

A flare of blinding sunlight smote across the glass goggles in Madge's
copper helmet. She felt herself picked up and lifted bodily into a boat.
Her helmet and corselet were unscrewed. She lay still, smiling faintly as
the boat made for her friends who crowded, watching, on the pier. Captain
Jules, bearing the small iron chest, landed a moment later. The little
captain had been in a new world, into which few men and rarely any women
have ever entered. She had been out of her human element, a creature of
the water, not of the air, and it seemed to her that she must have lived
a whole new lifetime as a deep-sea diver.

Tom Curtis stared anxiously at his watch and smiled into her white face.
He breathed a sigh of relief and of wonder. Captain Jules Fontaine and
Madge Morton had been down at the bottom of Delaware Bay exactly thirty
minutes!

CHAPTER XVII

THE FAIRY GODMOTHER'S WISH COMES TRUE

Captain Jules decided to wait until another day before taking Phyllis
Alden on the journey from which he and Madge had just returned. The old
sailor was too deeply thankful to see his first charge safe on land. Poor
Miss Jenny Ann could do nothing but lean over Madge and cry; the nervous
strain of waiting while the girl was under the water had been too great.
Indeed, even the people who, Madge knew, were not in the least interested
in her, appeared dreadfully upset. Philip Holt's face was very pale and
his eyes shifted uneasily from Phyllis's to Madge's face.

Phyllis was the most self-possessed of the four girls. She was greatly
disappointed at the captain's determination to put off the time for her
diving expedition until a later date. But Phyllis was always unselfish.
She realized that her chaperon and her friends had had about as much
anxiety as they could endure in one day. Madge had been under the water,
and she could not dream of what the others had suffered above, while
awaiting her return.

Mrs. Curtis put her arms about the