The rising wind was sending little waves over the outer edge of the small island of rocks on which the three were marooned. It was another evidence that the tide was getting higher and higher. "What _shall_ we do?" asked Ruth. "We must get help--_somehow_!" Alice said. Then she looked shoreward, in the direction Paul was gazing, and she uttered the single expression: "Oh!" But it was fraught with meaning. "Why--they've gone!" gasped Ruth. "What--what----" "They'll be back!" Paul interrupted. "Probably Mr. Pertell just thought of some scene he could get, and he took them off down the beach to put them all in it. They'll be back in a little while, and then we can signal to them." "If--if it isn't too--too late!" faltered Alice. "Too late? What do you mean?" demanded her sister. "I mean these rocks will soon be covered, and covered deep, too," Alice said. "The high water mark is away above them." "Is it, Paul?" demanded the older girl. She wanted the statement of Alice disproved. "I'm afraid it is," the young actor made answer. "And the tide, I am sorry to say, is likely to be unusually high today. The moon has something to do with it. But we will be taken off before then." "Suppose we aren't?" asked Alice. "The wind and the sea are rising, and if we are swept off the rocks----" "Don't be so tragic about it!" broke in Ruth. "If we are to go to sea, and be in a shipwreck, even if it is only pictured, we must learn to face perils. And here we are only a little way from shore." "That's right!" cried Paul. "That's the way to look at it, Alice. There's no danger!" "That's easy enough for you to say--you two who haven't a lame ankle," the younger girl said, seriously enough. "But I don't believe I can even swim!" "There will be no need of that," Paul said. "They are sure to come back and see our plight soon. I can't see what's keeping Russ. He promised to come back as soon as he fixed up another camera. It's very strange." Later they learned that when Russ and Mr. Pertell got back to the beach, leaving, as they supposed Ruth, her sister and Paul safe on the rocks, Pop Snooks, the veteran property man, discovered a certain nook that would answer for an important scene in the play. Wishing to take advantage of it at once, while the light was good, Mr. Pertell ordered the entire company over there to go through the prescribed "business." He took Russ and the two other camera operators with him, to make sure of getting at least one film. That is why the beach opposite the rocks where the three were marooned by the rising tide, was deserted just then. For the time both Mr. Pertell and Russ forgot their three friends, or, if they thought of them at all, it was to think that they were perfectly safe, and would come to no harm by waiting a bit. The tide rose higher and higher. In a few minutes it would lap the feet of the three marooned ones. A desperate resolve came into Paul's mind.