“Oh, there is Lawford!” murmured Louise.  “He’s with the surfmen!”

Two teams of heavy farm horses were dragging the boat and the surfmen’s two-wheeled cart along the hard sand at the edge of the surf.  The bursting waves wetted all the crew as they helped push the wagons, and the snorting horses were sometimes body deep in the water.

Lawford, in his fishermen’s garments, waved his hand to Louise and his father.  The girl smiled upon him proudly and the Taffy King, seeing the expression on her face, suddenly seized the missive from her hand.

“I give up!  I give up!” he exclaimed.  “I said I’d disown him if he refused to marry Dorothy Johnson, my partner’s daughter.  But ’tain’t really Lawford’s fault, I s’pose, if Dot won’t marry him.  It seems she had other ideas along that line, too, and I never knew it till we got this invitation to her wedding.”

Louise smiled on the little man with tolerance.  “Of course, I knew you would see it in the right light in time.  But it really has been the making of Lawford,” she said calmly.

“You think so, do you?” returned the Taffy King.  “I wonder what good it would have done him if you hadn’t been the prize he wanted?  I’m not sure I shouldn’t pay you out, Louise Grayling, by making the two of you live for a year on his eighteen dollars a week.”

“Are you sure that would be such a great punishment?” she asked him softly.

They moved on with the crowd about the gear and boat.  The patrol had come in good season.  It was not probable that the schooner would hold together long after she struck the reef.

Not until this moment, when she saw the stern faces of the men and the wan countenances of the women, did Louise understand what the incident really meant.  A few children, clinging to their mother’s skirts, whimpered.  The men talked in low voices, the women not at all.

Her heart suddenly shorn of its happiness, Louise Grayling stared out at the distant, laboring craft.  Death rode on the gale, and lurked where the billows roared and burst over Gull Rocks.  The schooner was doomed.

That might be the Curlew out there—­the schooner her father was aboard—­instead of this imperiled vessel.  Only the night before she and her uncle had figured out the Curlew’s course homeward-bound from her last port of call.  She might pass in sight of Cardhaven Head and the lighthouse any day now.

The thought sobered Louise.  Clinging to I. Tapp’s arm she went nearer to the spot where the surfmen had brought their gear and boat.

The sea beyond the line of surf—­between the strand and the reef—­was foam-streaked and broken, a veritable cauldron of boiling water.  The captain of the life-saving crew shrank from launching the boat into that wild waste.

If the line could be shot as far as the reef the moment the schooner struck, a breeches buoy could be rigged with less danger and, perhaps, with a better chance of bringing the ship’s company safely ashore.