But he must continue his recital, and, rousing himself with an effort, he went on. "Her father said, 'Derrice, this is Mr. Mercer,' and she shook hands with me. Then he asked her to go out and let me see how well she could swim. She rushed into the breakers-- They are very high out there and come in in three rows howling and plunging like dogs, and throwing up spray half as high as this house. She dived through one line and another and another, then we saw her head rising beyond them. After a time I wondered why she didn't come in, but no one else seemed uneasy. The other young people had sat down on the hot sand, and her father was taken up with pride in her strength, when some one waved a marine glass from the hotel veranda and cried, 'The tide has turned,--Miss Derrice can't get in, she has been floating for some time.'" Justin stopped again, and once more lived over his brief experience on the shores of the Pacific,--the quick agony of the father who turned and measured the strength of the young men before him, their responsive looks as they ran like deer down the beach to launch a boat, the cries of consternation of the girls as they hurried into the sea and stretched out helpless hands, and the furious beating and protesting of his own heart at the sudden snatching of his newly found treasure from him by the cruel sea. He would recover her alone and unaided, or he would die with her, and, tearing off his boots and coat, he had plunged through the rows of indignant breakers that slapped and buffeted him until he reached a region of calm where warm waves lapped his throat and playfully tried to blind his eyes with spray. In deliberate haste, for he was strong and broad of limb, he had hurried to the spot where she lay rising and falling on the water, her face like a lily-bud, her limbs stretched out like folded leaves. The glare of the sun, the brass of the sky, his steady, cool head, his beating heart, the look the girl gave him when she raised her head from the waves as from a pillow,--to his dying day he would never forget it all, and he grew pale at the remembrance. His musings were interrupted by his mother's harsh voice, "Why couldn't she get in?" "When the tide turns the undertow is frightful. Several drowning accidents had occurred there, it being a hard place to launch a boat, and as the bathing season had not begun, the life-saving appliances were not in readiness." Mrs. Prymmer asked no question for a time, but encouraged by a gleam of sympathy on her face, Justin observed, dryly, "She was afraid we could not get out to her, and she was repeating poetry to keep herself from losing her presence of mind." "I guess she wasn't much frightened," observed Mrs. Prymmer, hardening her heart again. "She has a good deal of nerve," said Justin, quietly. "She doesn't look it, but she has." "Well, they must have got her in," said his mother, impatiently, "as she is here; how did they do it?"