“We’re the owl and the pussy-cat who went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, ’With plenty of honey and lots of money, wrapped up in a ten-pound note.’  Some day when we’ve settled down in our Harlem flat, and I’m working hard, we’ll look back on this and consider it romantic, thrilling.  Maybe we’ll long for excitement.”

“Not I,” Rosa shivered.  “To be safe, to have you all to myself where I can spoil you, that will be excitement enough.”

“We’ll rent that little apartment I looked at, or one just like it.”

“But, O’Rail-ye, we’re rich.”

“I—­I’d forgotten that.  Then let’s pretend to be poor.  Think how our neighbors would talk about that pretty Mrs. O’Reilly on the fourth floor, and her magnificent jewels.  They’d swear I was a smuggler.”

As the evening lengthened and the boat forged steadily ahead the two sat murmuring happily.  Forward, another bride and groom were similarly engaged.  Branch and Jacket took turns bailing.

It proved to be a long, long night, for the boat, though roomy, was uncomfortable.  O’Reilly steered as straight a course as he could without compass, but toward morning he saw that the sky was growing overcast and his apprehensions stirred anew.  Daylight brought an increased breeze which heeled the boat further.  She made better speed, but she likewise took more water through her seams and it became necessary to lend Leslie and Jacket a hand with the bailing.  The deep channel was far behind now, and they were on the shallow Bahama Banks; beneath them they could glimpse beds of sponges, patches of coral, white bottom with occasional forests of brilliant-hued sea fans.  The horizon still remained vacant and the tip of Andros lay far to the north.

Fortunately the haze was not thick enough to wholly obscure the sun and so O’Reilly was enabled to hold his course.  But he did not like the look of things.

By ten o’clock the sea was tumbling and the worm-eaten hulk was laboring.  It became necessary to shorten sail.  Soon the bottom of the boat was awash and Esteban lay in a pool of brine.  Even when the girls helped to dip it out they could not lower its level.  The wind freshened steadily; all hands worked desperately, wet to the skin.

In time there came a spiteful drizzle which completely hid the sun and left no indication of the course except the direction whence drove the rain.

No one spoke now.  Even Esteban lay silent, shivering miserably upon his sodden bed.  In obedience to O’Reilly’s command Jacket flung overboard all but a half-dozen of the remaining cocoanuts.  Rosa finally straightened her aching back and smiled at her husband.

“Are we going down?” she asked.

“Oh no!  This is merely a squall,” he told her, with an assumption of confidence he was far from feeling.

Johnnie tried to reason himself into a more hopeful frame of mind.  He assured himself that he and his companions had survived too many perils to become the prey of an idle breeze like this; he argued that no fate could be so cruel as to cheat them when they were so close to safety.  But this manful effort brought him little comfort in the face of the chilling rain and with the whitecaps curling higher.