Straightway he gave the signal to ascend; three sharp tugs at his life line. Madge followed suit. But she cast one long backward glance at the watery world into which she might never again descend, as slowly, steadily, the boat tenders pulled up her long life line. Her feet dangled above the sandy bottom of the bay. Now she could see even farther off. About forty feet from the rapidly filling hole from which she and the captain had extracted the iron chest was a spar of a ship jutting above the sand. The little captain may have been wrong, but it looked like the very spar on which Tania's dress had caught the day she was so nearly drowned. Madge could not tell how far she and Captain Jules had traveled on the bottom of the bay, but she knew they had made their descent at a place no very great distance from the spot where Roy Dennis's yacht had run down their skiff, and Captain Jules had rescued Tania and herself. Thought travels swifter than anything else in the created world. So Madge's thoughts had reached the upper world before she followed them. She wondered if the girls would be very sadly disappointed when she returned bearing, instead of a costly pearl, nothing but a rusted iron box! Would Phil have better luck when she descended to the depths of the bay? What had happened in the outside world since she had disappeared from it a long, long time ago? A flare of blinding sunlight smote across the glass goggles in Madge's copper helmet. She felt herself picked up and lifted bodily into a boat. Her helmet and corselet were unscrewed. She lay still, smiling faintly as the boat made for her friends who crowded, watching, on the pier. Captain Jules, bearing the small iron chest, landed a moment later. The little captain had been in a new world, into which few men and rarely any women have ever entered. She had been out of her human element, a creature of the water, not of the air, and it seemed to her that she must have lived a whole new lifetime as a deep-sea diver. Tom Curtis stared anxiously at his watch and smiled into her white face. He breathed a sigh of relief and of wonder. Captain Jules Fontaine and Madge Morton had been down at the bottom of Delaware Bay exactly thirty minutes! CHAPTER XVII THE FAIRY GODMOTHER'S WISH COMES TRUE Captain Jules decided to wait until another day before taking Phyllis Alden on the journey from which he and Madge had just returned. The old sailor was too deeply thankful to see his first charge safe on land. Poor Miss Jenny Ann could do nothing but lean over Madge and cry; the nervous strain of waiting while the girl was under the water had been too great. Indeed, even the people who, Madge knew, were not in the least interested in her, appeared dreadfully upset. Philip Holt's face was very pale and his eyes shifted uneasily from Phyllis's to Madge's face.