From alarm her look gave way to wonderment, then almost to mirth. It was a hard place for a girl to be in, and I expected her to leave me now, find the old chap and promptly have me hanged to a yard-arm. The fact that there are no yard-arms on schooner yachts made no difference. And I do believe she was considering that when a sailor passed us, looking enough like Tommy to have been his twin brother. "Jack," she said to him, "tell Mr. Graham to come below!" The fellow saluted and left, and I stared at her in surprise, saying: "Then my name can't seem very odd to you, Miss Graham!" She was regarding me as though trying to discover what kind of a species I was that had got on her father's yacht, when the sailor came back followed by a husky brute in uniform. Intuitively I stiffened to meet the crisis, but even at this eleventh hour a respite came. "He ain't aboard," the other Jack whispered, and the captain--for the burly one was only the captain, after all--saluted, saying: "I've just now found out, ma'am, he ain't aboard!" "Not aboard? What do you mean?" "After bringing you on last night he went ashore again to get a little ball of paper, but told me to sail the minute he returned. I don't understand it, ma'am, for later the watch woke me to say Mr. Graham had come." "Good Lord," I groaned. "It was I, and not your father, who answered the watch." For several minutes we stared blankly into each other's faces, but it was she who broke the deadly silence. "We must hurry back," she calmly told him, adding with a nervous catch in her breath: "What a joke on Daddy!" "A scream of a joke," I muttered, "----one he'll roar over till God-knows-when!" "We can't go back, Miss Sylvia," the captain now said. "When our mainsheet parted the boom gybed so hard that it opened a seam. It may hold on this tack, and it may not, but we'd sink if the weather hit us on the other side. So I'm making for Key West." A suspicious quiver played over her lips as the big fellow turned and went upstairs, and I began to hate myself rather cordially. "Do you happen to have that--that ball of paper?" she asked, when the threatened storm of tears had been controlled. "No, I threw it down." A look of terror came into her eyes as she gasped: "Then he'll find it!" "It won't matter if he does! You hadn't written anything on it!" "Did you look on both sides of it?" "I--I think so; of course, I must have. Did you write on the other side?" "I don't know which the other side is that you refer to," she answered with some show of anger. "There were two sides, you know. Still, it can't much matter now whether it had any sides or not." This was very perplexing, the words no more so than the way she looked at me while pronouncing them. Yet I hardly thought it should give her as much concern as our leaky boat. The storm had grown worse, and more than once she glanced anxiously at the portholes whose glass, over half the time, were submerged by swirls of greenish water.