, buy the schooner and the trade
goods, and then sail for Manga Reva in the Gambier Group, where Masters
and his wife were to buy a bit of land and put up a trading station,
whilst Laurance ran the little vessel to and fro among the various
islands of the group, and brought back pearl shell and copra for sale
to the big German firm in Tahiti. And Masters's pretty wife smiled
joyously. She did not like to be parted from Tom for nearly seven
months; but seven months was not a lifetime--and then they would be so
happy, away from the grinding poverty of their existence in Sydney.

* * * * *

Dreams! Six weeks afterwards, as the old _Noord Brabant_ lay groaning
over on her beam ends, thrashing her canvas to ribbons in a fierce night
squall off Beveridge Reef, Tom Masters, hurrying on deck to help
the hands shorten sail, was knocked overboard by the parting of the
spanker-boom guy, and disappeared without a cry, into the seething boil
to leeward.

For two hours--after the squall had ceased, and Masters was missed--the
boat searched for him under the bright rays of a silvery moon and a
clear, cloudless sky. But every now and then rain fell heavily, and
though the boat rowed round and round the ship within a radius of two or
three miles no answering cry came to the repeated hails of the crew.
So then the _Noord Brabant_ stood away again on her course, and Harry
Laurance lay awake all his watch below, thinking sadly of his friend and
of the dreadful shock which awaited the young wife in Sydney.

But Tom Masters did not drown. When he came to the surface of the water
he found himself floating among the _debris_ of the quarter-boat,
which, when the spanker-boom guy parted and the heavy spar swung over
to leeward, had swept the after-davit out of its socket and let the boat
hang, stern down, by the for'ard fall, until the labouring old barque,
raising her stern high out of the water, smashed down upon it as it
dragged under her counter and tore out the for'ard ringbolt.

Half-stunned by the force of the blow which he had received on the back
of his head from the spanker-boom when it swept him overboard, Masters
was yet able to swim to the wreckage of the boat which he saw floating
near him, and, clinging to the after part of the keel, he saw the
cabin lights of the Noord Brabant shining brightly through the square,
old-fashioned ports for a minute or two, and heard the cries of her
crew as the s