even the pilot got over
his anxiety at the overloading which had taken place when Westcott got
in. The old tar said to Towle that she carried herself beautifully.

Five minutes after he made the remark, while Westcott was talking to
Katy, and playfully holding his fingers in the water as he leaned over
the gunwale that almost dipped, there came a flaw in the wind, and the
little boat, having too much canvas and too much loading, careened
suddenly and capsized.

There was a long, broken, mingled, discordant shriek as of a dozen voices
on different keys uttering cries of terror and despair. There was the
confusion of one person falling over another; there was the wild grasping
for support, the seizing of each other's garments and arms, the undefined
and undefinable struggle of the first desperate minute after a boat has
capsized, the scream that dies to a gurgle in the water and then breaks
out afresh, louder and sharper than before, and then is suddenly
smothered into a gurgle again. There were all these things, there was an
alarm on the shore, a rush of people, and then there came stillness, and
those minutes of desperate waiting, in which the drowning people cling to
rigging and boat, and test the problem of human endurance. It is a race
between the endurance of frightened, chilled, drowning people, and the
stupid lack of presence of mind of those on shore. All the inmates of the
boat got hold of something, and for a minute all their heads were out of
water. Their eyes were so near to the water, that not even the most
self-possessed of them could see what exertions were being made by people
on shore to help them. Thus they clung a minute, no one saying anything,
when Jane Downing, who held to the rigging at some distance from the
boat, paralyzed by fear, let go, and slowly sank out of sight, saying
never a word as she went down, but looking with beseeching eyes at the
rest, who turned away as the water closed over her, and held on more
tenaciously than ever, and wondered whether help ever would reach them.
And this was only at the close of the first minute. There were
twenty-nine other minutes before help came.

CHAPTER XXIII.

SINKING.

Isabel Marlay's first care had been to see that little Katy had a good
hold. Helen Minorkey was quite as self-possessed, but her chief care was
to get into a secure position herself. Nothing brings out character more
distinctly than an emergency such as this. Miss Minorke