ld get their knives through the tough rope, the
"Starlight" reared like a bucking mare and plunged to her grave,
dragging with her lifeboat No. 1 and its eight occupants.

"Jump for it!" yelled the boatswain.

Matheson, one foot caught under a seat, was dragged down and down until
his heart hammered like a piston and his lungs were bursting with the
fierce effort to hold his breath.

To the drowning man there comes a moment when he perforce gives up the
fight and abandons himself to the blessed peace of unconsciousness, like
a wanderer in a snowstorm lying down to rest. That moment had come to
Matheson, when suddenly the half-severed rope that shackled the lifeboat
to the doomed yacht gave way, and with a mutinous jerk the boat rushed
itself to the surface, bottom upwards, flinging Matheson clear.

His craving lungs opened to the free air; he lay back on his cork-jacket
gulping it in greedily as the whirlpool formed by the sinking yacht
carried him round and round in dizzy circles.

The moments of recuperation past, his first thought was for his wife. He
caught sight of a shapeless something at the further side of the
whirlpool, and with all his strength beat round towards it. It was
Olive, clinging to an oar.

He reached her; shouted some words of hope above the roar of the wind;
searched around the blackness of the night for a place of safety. Thirty
yards away, tossed upwards on a giant wave as though in signal to them,
there showed for a brief moment the silhouette of an upturned boat, with
two men clinging to it.

"Our boat--over there!" he cried to Olive, and clutching her by the arm,
fought the combers towards the hope of refuge.

Straddled across the upturned lifeboat were the boatswain and a seaman.
The others had disappeared. On such a night it was impossible to rescue
them unless by the accident of chance.

Matheson, buffeted and blinded by the thrash of the waves, just managed
to drag Olive to the boat's side. The boatswain, Fraser by name, lent
him a hand while he recuperated sufficiently to hoist Olive across the
keel of the storm-tossed boat.

"Where are the other boats?" he asked of Fraser, when he had recovered
speech.

The boatswain made a gesture of helplessness. In that inky night, who
could say where lifeboats No. 2 and 4 might be?

Presently a rocket flung a rain of white stars across the black curtain
of the sky. It must be from one of their own boats. But it was far away
across the