Roswell Gardiner stood on his own quarter-deck, anxiously watching the drift of the other schooner, as she drew near in her laboured way, struggling ahead through billows that were almost as white as the breakers that menaced them with destruction to leeward. The anchored vessel, though drifting, had so slow a movement that it served to mark the steady and rapid set of its consort towards its certain fate. At first, it seemed to Gardiner that Daggett would pass just ahead of him, and he trembled for his cables, which occasionally appeared above water, stretched like bars of iron, for the distance of thirty or forty fathoms. But, the leeward set of the vessel under way was too fast to give her any chance of bringing this new danger on her consort. When a cable's length distant, the Sea Lion, of the Vineyard, _did_ seem as if she might weather her consort; but, ere that short space was passed over, it was found that she fell off so fast, by means of her drift, as to carry her fairly clear of her stern. The two masters, holding with one hand to some permanent object by which to steady themselves, and each pressing his tarpaulin firmly down on his head with the other, had a minute's conversation when the schooners were nearest together. "Do your anchors hold?" demanded Daggett, who was the first to speak, and who put his question as if he thought his own fate depended on the answer. "I'm sorry to say they do not. We drift our length in about two minutes." "That will put off the evil moment an hour or two. Look what a wake _we_ are making!" Sure enough, that wake was frightful! No sooner was the head of the Sea Lion, of the Vineyard, fairly up with the stern of the Sea Lion, of Oyster Pond, than Gardiner perceived that she went off diagonally, moving quite as fast to leeward as she went ahead. This was so very obvious that a line drawn from the quarter of Roswell's craft, in a quartering direction, would almost have kept the other schooner in its range from the moment that her bow hove heavily past. "God bless you!--God bless you!" cried Roswell Gardiner, waving his hand in adieu, firmly persuaded that he and the Vineyard master were never to meet again in this world. "The survivors must let the fate of the lost be known. At the pinch, I shall out boats, if I can." The other made no answer. It would have been useless, indeed, to attempt it; since no human voice had power to force itself up against such a gale, the distance that had now to be overcome. "That schooner will be in the breakers in half an hour," said Hazard, who stood by the side of young Gardiner. "Why don't he anchor! No power short of Divine Providence can save her." "And Divine Providence will do it--thanks to Almighty God for his goodness!" exclaimed Roswell Gardiner. "Did you perceive that, Mr. Hazard?"