“Are you dressed already, Helga?” demanded Miss Ravenden. “How do you do it?” 

 “I hadn’t undressed, Dolly,” said the other girl, gravely. “I knew—I felt that something——” 

 She paused. 

 “Helga’s dreams always come to pass, you know,” said the man of the elusive sweater half banteringly. “What infernal kind of a knot has that shoe lace tied itself into?” 

 “Pray God this dream doesn’t come to pass,” said the girl outside, under her breath as she passed Colton’s door. 

 Another rocket and a third pierced the night and the response came, in a rising glow of light from the beach. “The life-savers are at hand,” observed the professor below. “Make haste, daughter. If we are—” 

 A burst of thunder drowned him out. 

 “This,” said Colton with conviction, as he dove into his heavy jersey jacket and seized a cap from a peg, “is going to be a grand place for an insomnia patient! I can see that, right at the start.” 

 As he ran out of his door he collided violently with a small, dark, sinewy man who had hurriedly emerged from the opposite room. 

 “Don’t apologise, and I won’t,” said Colton as they clutched each other. “My name is Colton. Yours is Haynes. May I go to the shore with you? I don’t know the way.” 

 “Apparently you don’t know the way to the stairs,” returned the other a trifle tartly. Looking at his keen, pallid and deeply lined face, the young doctor set him down as a rather irritable fellow, and suspected dyspepsia. “Everybody will be going to the beach,” he added. “If you follow along you’ll probably get there.” 

 “Thanks,” said Dick undisturbedly. It was a principle of his that the ill-temper of others was no logical reason for ill-temper in himself. In this case his principle worked well, for Haynes said with tolerable civility: 

 “You just came in this evening, didn’t you?” 

 “Yes. I seem to have met the market for excitement.” 

 By this time they had reached the large living-room, where they found Mrs. Johnston presiding with ill-directed advice over the struggles of her grey-bearded husband to insert himself into a pair of boots of insufficient calibre. 

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