The Girl of the Golden Gate
lifted—of rising swiftly. She caught a breath and opened her eyes; and again from a seeming great height she beheld in awe the youth of the day striding across an angry waste of waters.

The terrific buffeting of the boat, under the gunwale of which she crouched, had been going on for hours. Until this moment she had been only dimly conscious of it because the darkness gives one no background; no line of contrast by which the mind may measure its impressions. One thought only had lived persistently: that her reason might leave her. It still endured. But the human mind installed in a normal, healthy body like hers does not break so easily. No one becomes insane quickly any more than one becomes a thief quickly. A long process of decay must precede.

As Emily's body readjusted itself to the cockleshell's wild movements her senses began to recover their power of apprehension. She realized that she was clutching a hand—a hand she remembered snatching out of the night as the vortex of the sinking Cambodia seemed about to suck the boat down to the deeps. Through the eternity of blackness which had passed its touch had been her link to sentient life. She held it up now and saw that it was the hand of a strong man, with a strange ring of green jade upon it. The hand closed upon hers gently and trustfully.

Then, she became aware that a weight was upon her limbs and she looked down. A man's head lay in her lap just free of the foaming wash in the boat's bottom. It was the hand of this man that she clasped and that was clasping hers tightly. She bent closer, with a new fear starting in her heart for the face was very white. A stronger volume of light shot into the heavens. It was the man Whitridge—Lavelle!

The boat plunged from the crest of a gray-backed comber and ended its descent with a racking jerk. Emily Granville was thrown across Lavelle, her face pressed against his spray-wet lips. She struggled to draw away, but the sea, as if in mockery, held her close to this man and weltered them in its spume.

When the boat rose again she straightened with a shudder. A wave of horror mixed with hateful revulsion swept over her. She tried to pull herself away from him, but the weight of his head and shoulders and a woman cowering at her side pinned her down. She freed one of her hands, but Lavelle's held the other in a grip which her strength could not break.

Then, gradually, her natural spirit of justice and humanity assumed rule, overcoming even what had been almost an obsession since 
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