Let's Kiss and Part

27

The sea was unusually calm and smooth that morning. A skillful swimmer could make good headway against the tide.

Frank was an athlete and swimming lightly and strongly after the vanishing lifeboat, he looked about anxiously for Jennings, hoping to assist him.

To his surprise and dismay, not a sign was to be seen of the fair head of the man in whom he took an almost painful interest for the sake of his daughter.

His straining gaze wandered here and there over the illuminated waters, but the glare of the burning ship pained his eyes, and nothing could be seen but floating, swirling black cinders, and the lifeboats vanishing in the gloom of the cold, gray dawn.

His heart sank with pain and sympathy thinking of the life gone down to the depths so suddenly, and the fair daughter left fatherless.

"Alone among those selfish wretches who received her so reluctantly that I feared to trust her to their care! What will become of her, poor girl?" he thought, and obeying a blind impulse he could not resist, swam after the boat that he now observed had slackened its speed as though too heavy freighted, being sunk to the water's edge.

What he hoped or expected from following he did not know himself. The boat was so full they could not have made any room for him. He was all alone in the wide waste of waters with nothing but a spar between him and eternity, and the chances were all against his rescue. With his superb strength and skill, he might keep afloat for hours—or, something might happen to end his life any moment, he could not tell.

He was near enough now to see that there was some commotion in the boat as though of men struggling together in fierce dispute, and the rowers had much ado to keep it from being overset.

Fate had indeed brought Angelina and Frank together again under circumstances the most awful that could be imagined—both face to face with death, having scarcely one chance in a hundred of escape from their perilous strait.

As for Angelina, the only hope lay in Frank's ability to reach and save her if she should rise to the surface again.

With a wild prayer to Heaven on his pallid lips, he swam quickly toward the spot where the white form had disappeared beneath the engulfing waves, but ere he reached it he saw to his joy that she had risen again and was floating on the surface, her skirts upheld by a piece of plank on which they had caught and become entangled.

His heart gave a wild, suffocating leap; his throat swelled; hot tears of joy sprang to his dark-blue eyes as he redoubled his efforts to reach her side.

Breathless, spent, exhausted with his wild struggle to overcome death, he reached the silent, floating form with its still, white face upturned to the sky, the golden locks streaming loose upon the water, and he clasped the beauteous form with the frenzy we feel when that which is dearest to us on earth seems to slip away from us forever.

He had never spoken one word to her, never touched her hand, never looked into her soft, dark eyes, as he believed, yet while she had stood there singing in the moonlight, she had lured the heart from his breast because she brought back to his infancy the dead girl, he had loved too late.

He vowed to himself that he would never be parted from this dead love of his, so fair and still. They would float together side by side until he knew there was no longer any hope of her recovery, then he would fold her in his arms and they would plunge down together to the depths of the ocean.

A sudden cry—of commingled hope, surprise, and doubt—shrilled over his blanched lips:

"Ah, am I dreaming, or is this a blissful reality? Did her lips move, her eyelids flutter?"

But it was no dream as he feared, no fancy of an overwrought brain.

A faint tinge of color had crept into the waxen cheek, the eyelids fluttered nervously, the lips parted in a strangling gasp.

A cry of rapture escaped his lips, and at the sound so close to her ears Angelina opened wide her eyes with a dazed look straight upon his face.

Frank watched Angelina's great, dark eyes widen and darken with feeling, and guessed the thought in her mind before she murmured in anguish:

"Papa!"

He answered tenderly:

"Afloat somewhere on the wide, wide sea, as we are, little Angelina, and held in the hollow of the same Divine Hand that is able to save us even from this terrible plight. Be brave, and let us hope for the best."

His voice trembled, for he knew too well how desperate were their chances, how slender the thread of hope to which they could cling.

Yet he was not at all unhappy.

All that the world held for him as the dearest and sweetest was beside him here in the person of this girl almost a stranger to him, yet so fatally dear that she blotted out everything on earth beside.

She saw Frank lingering near, but she quickly turned her head away, saying to herself that she would not speak to him if she were dying.

Such a little time afterward she had been caught up in his arms and borne down the ladder to the boat, swooning as soon as she was placed in it, and now—now—the incredible horror of the thought made her dizzy—she was lost to all the world but this man, alone with him on the wide, wide sea, under his protection, at his mercy.

How had it all come about?

Feminine curiosity made her put aside her vow of silence, and she looked at him with wide, solemn eyes, murmuring:

"Where is the boat?"

"You fell out of it and sank, and those wretches left you to your fate. I saw them and swam near, catching you as you came to the surface."

"Then—I—owe—you—my—life!".

"Yes," he answered, and she wondered at the sweet, significant smile that played around his lips.

He dared not tell his companion, either, of how the fiends in the boat had cast her out into the sea to perish. The shock would be too great to her nerves, already shattered by grief at her father's loss.

He said to himself that if they escaped the perils of the sea the time might come when he could safely tell her these things and ask her to give him her life that he had saved to gladden his home forever.

They kept close together, their eyes turned on the far distance, watching for the gleam of a sail that might presage rescue, but at last, hope began to die in their hearts, they were so weary with the buffeting of the cruel waves and the hot glare of the sun that they were almost ready to close their eyes on the waste of sunlit water and sink down, down, down, through the cool, green darkness to eternal rest.