go out to the ship over the
ice-floe!"

"Let's do it," said Marian enthusiastically. "Perhaps there's some
sort of a solution to our problem there."

They were soon threading their way in and out among the ice-piles which
were already solidly attaching themselves to the sand beneath the
shallow water.

And now they reached a spot where the water was deeper, where
ice-cakes, some small as a kitchen floor, some large as a town lot,
jostled and ground one upon another.

"Wo-oo, I don't like it!" exclaimed Lucile, as she leaped a narrow
chasm of dark water.

"We'll soon be there," trilled her companion. "Just watch your step,
that's all."

They pushed on, leaping from cake to cake. Racing across a broad
ice-pan, now skirting a dark pool, now clambering over a pile of ice
ground fine, they made their way slowly but surely toward their goal.

"Listen!" exclaimed Marian, stopping dead in her tracks.

"What is it?" asked Lucile, her voice quivering with alarm.

A strange, wild, weird sound came to them across the floe, a grinding,
rushing, creaking, moaning sound that increased in volume as the voice
of a cyclone increases.

Only a second elapsed before they knew. Then with a cry of terror
Marian dragged her companion to the center of the ice-pan and pulled
her flat to its surface. From somewhere, far out to sea, a giant tidal
wave was sweeping through the ice-floe. Marian had seen it. The
mountain of ice which it bore on its crest seemed as high as the solid
ridge of rock behind them on the land. And with its weird, wild,
rushing scream of grinding and breaking ice, it was traveling toward
them. It had the speed of the wind, the force of an avalanche. When
it came, what then?

With a rush the wild terror of the Arctic sea burst upon them. It
lifted the giant ice-pan weighing hundreds of tons, tilted it to a
dangerous angle, then dropped from beneath it. Marian's heart stopped
beating as she felt the downward rush of the avalanche of ice. The
next instant she felt it crumble like an egg-shell. It had broken at
the point where they lay. With a warning cry of terror she sprang to
her feet and pitched forward.

The cry was too late. As she rose unsteadily to her knees, she saw a
dark brown bulk topple at the edge of the cake, then roll like a log
into the dark pool of water which appeared where the cake had parted.
That object was Lucile. Dead or alive? Marian could not tell. But
whether dead o