Page:Silver Shoal Light.djvu/292

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SILVER SHOAL LIGHT

laughing reply. She bowed her head in new shame. She had deliberately gone on beyond Trasket Rock, where they could have made a safe and easy landing before the squall struck. She had sailed on, with so much bravado, such blind confidence in her knowledge of handling a boat. Her confidence was gone.

She began to call up more agonizing pictures with which to torment herself. If the boom had struck Garth at the end of the jibe, instead of at the beginning when it had barely gathered way; if it had swept him overboard; if the boat had capsized, which might well have happened! She thought out at unnecessary length and detail what she could have done under all these circumstances, and grew more and more wretched. For faint consolation she remembered the treasure then, and the miraculous finding of the sword-hilt. And, perhaps because imagination was more or less concerned with this particular train of thought, Mr. Robert Sinclair came to mind. It was by no means the first time she had thought of him since her arrival at the lighthouse, and each time she did so she regretted more and more her rude, unpleasant answers to him. She wished now, with all her heart, that she had listened to what he