nd while the party were being towed home the
peril seemed to have been exaggerated, and the affair to look like an
ordinary sea incident. But the skipper said that it was one escape in a
hundred.

The captain of the steamer raised his hat gravely in reply to the
little cheer from the yacht, when Carmen and Miss Tavish fluttered their
handkerchiefs towards him. The only chaff from the steamer was roared
out by a fat Boston man, who made a funnel of his hands and shouted,
"The race is not always to the swift."

As soon as Jack stepped ashore he telegraphed to Edith that the yacht
had had an accident in the harbor, but that no one was hurt. When he
reached the hotel he found a letter from Edith of such a tenor that he
sent another despatch, saying that she might expect him at once, leaving
the yacht behind. There was a buzz of excitement in the town, and there
were a hundred rumors, which the sight of the yacht and its passengers
landed in safety scarcely sufficed to allay.

When Jack called at the Tavish cottage to say good-by, both the ladies
were too upset to see him. He took a night train, and as he was whirled
away in the darkness the events of the preceding forty-eight hours
seemed like a dream. Even the voyage up the coast was a little
unreal--an insubstantial episode in life. And the summer city by the
sea, with its gayety and gossip and busy idleness, sank out of sight
like a phantom. He drew his cap over his eyes, and was impatient that
the rattling train did not go faster, for Edith, waiting there in the
Golden House, seemed to stretch out her arms for him to come. Still
behind him rose a picture of that bacchanalian breakfast--the Major and
Carmen and Mavick and Miss Tavish dancing a reel on the sloping deck,
then the rising wind, the reckless daring of the race, and a vision of
sudden death. He shuddered for the first time in a quick realization of
how nearly it came to being all over with life and its pleasures.

XIV

Edith had made no appeal to Jack to come home. His going, therefore, had
the merit in his eyes of being a voluntary response to the promptings of
his better nature. Perhaps but for the accident at Mount Desert he might
have felt that his summer pleasure was needlessly interfered with,
but the little shock of that was a real, if still temporary, moral
turning-point for him. For the moment his inclination seemed to run with
his duty, and he had his reward in Edith's happiness at his com