and neither of them remembered past or future in the passion of the present; neither of them felt the yacht swing idly up and down with scarcely a movement forward; neither of them heard the listless flapping of the sails against the masts, or noticed that no dew lay on the rail, or once looked up to see how black and close the air had gathered round them, how deadly hot and sulphurous—­till suddenly, and as if by one accord, men were running and voices were crying all about them.  They sprang to their feet to hear the sailing-master’s shout as one beholds lightning fall out of a blue sky:  “See your halyards all clear for running.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” came the ringing answer.

“Stand by your halyards and down-hauls.”

“Ay, ay, sir!”

“Haul down the flying jib:  take the bonnet off the jib, and put a reef in her,” came the strong swift sentences.  “Brail up the foresail, and double reef the mainsail.”

There was a sound far, far off, like a mighty rush of waters, coming nearer and swelling to a roar—­an awful roar of winds and waves.  And Helen was wildly clasping Reyburn, who was plunging with her down the companion-way.

“Here she comes!” cried the captain.  “Hold on all!” And then there was a shock that threw them prostrate, a writhing and twisting of every plank beneath them, and the tornado had struck the yacht and knocked her on her beam-ends.

“Cut away the weather rigging!” they heard the captain thunder through all the rout before they had once tried to regain themselves.  The quick, sharp blows resounded across the beating of the billow and the shrieking of the wind and cloud.  “Stand clear, all!” and with a crash as if the heavens were coming together the masts had gone by the board, and what there was left of the Beachbird had righted and now rolled a wreck in the trough of the sea.

A half hour’s work, but it had done more than wreck a ship:  it had wrecked a passion.  For as Helen still clung round Reyburn, sobbing and screaming, he had seen the opposite door open, and Lilian landing there, white-robed, white-shawled, with her bright hair about her face as white as a spirit’s.  “John,” she said, “we are in a hurricane.”

“Yes, Lilian,” he had answered from where he was stationed close beside her door.  “But the worst must be over.  The wind already abates, and as soon as the sea goes down—­”

As he spoke there came the terrible cry, loud above all other clamor, “A leak! a leak!” and then followed the renewed trampling of feet overhead, and the hoarse wheeze of the pumps.

“We are going down,” Lilian said, and turned that white face away.  “Oh, John!, before we go forgive me,” she cried; and John held his outstretched arms toward her and folded her within them.