talk encouragingly, telling them to keep their seats, to take off their shoes, ready to swim and to try to reach the rope if Jack were successful in getting it to the dock. Jack was standing with the rope in his hands ready to jump to the dock as soon as they reached it. They had already felt a slight diminution in the force of the wind as they drew near the hoped for side of the Island, yet the waves were a dangerous foe.

Then it happened, all in a moment it seemed. The engine, which had worked so hard for them against the wind and waves that beat upon the Greycliff till it quivered, broke. At the same time the steering wheel turned, useless, with connections torn apart. Mickey jumped up in despair. Jack lost the rope as the little Greycliff was whirled around, but as it fell and Jack was tossed out of the boat, Juliet, who had risen, with her arm around one of the supports, caught it and with her practiced hand, threw it through wind and rain to the dock where providentially it caught around a tall post, the one at which Juliet, half blinded by the spray, had aimed it. Not for nothing had Juliet been Polly’s shadow and learned to throw a lariat. But little did the rope avail to hold the Greycliff. The girls found themselves in the water, held up by the life preservers, it is true, but tossed and beaten upon by the heavy waves, scarcely able to get a breath, and only dimly sensing in which direction lay the shore.

As Dr. Norris felt the boat whirl, he had called to the girls to jump, and a few heard him. Now, as he held firmly to Patty, whom he had caught up as he jumped, he groaned as he thought some of the girls might have been caught in the boat as she went over. The Greycliff, however, at first went over on her side, straining at the rope, to which immediately a number of the girls were clinging. Dr. Norris in a few moments felt the sand under his feet, struggled with Patty to the land, and while she was still choking and clearing her throat and lungs of the lake water, he told her to get up out of the reach of the waves and count the girls as he and Mickey brought them in. “And pray, Patty, that we may find every one!”

Jack was nowhere to be seen, but Mickey was already helping some of the girls who were trying to reach the rope, as Dr. Norris threw himself into the water where he saw some bobbing heads drifting out instead of in.

 CHAPTER VII.THE WRECK OF THE GREYCLIFF—CONTINUED. 

CHAPTER VII.

THE WRECK OF THE GREYCLIFF—CONTINUED.

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