Fate had indeed brought Jessie Lyndon and Frank Laurier 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 Jessie, the only hope lay in Frank Laurier’s ability to reach and save her if she should rise to the surface again. Ah, what deeds of valor Love can do! How it fires the heart, and nerves the arm to superhuman strength! 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 slipping away from us forever. “Jessie! Jessie!” he groaned, with a wild recollection of a face so like to this that he had seen once lying among funeral flowers in the ghastly shadow of the old family vault. “Jessie! Jessie!” But there came no movement of the white lips in answer to his wild appeal. Yet even dead he would not cast her from him, but arranging her form carefully on the plank, and placing the spar beneath himself, they floated for an hour--the seeming dead and the anguished living side by side, away from the burning ship slowly settling beneath the waters, out on the trackless waste, while the gray light in the sky slowly brightened. Laurier’s eyes gazed on the beautiful face in mute love and despair, while in his heart there echoed the sweet plaint she had sung but yesternight: “Love, I will love you ever, Love, I will leave you never, Ever to me, precious to be, Never to part, heart bound to heart, Ever am I, never to say good-by!” 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 him in fancy 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 on 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 ocean. A sudden cry--of commingled hope, surprise, and doubt--shrilled over his blanched lips: