But Philip Holt sat crouched in the bottom of the boat, his face white with anger. What would Phyllis Alden’s action suggest but that he was trying to suffocate Madge in the water below?
Whether or not Philip Holt meant to stifle Madge Morton he himself never really knew. The impulse came to him as he placed his hands on her air-pump. It flashed across his mind that it was Madge who had tried to injure his prospects with Mrs. Curtis, and who had kept him from going down with Captain Jules to search for the pearls that he firmly believed would be found at the bottom of the bay. It was while these thoughts passed through Philip Holt’s mind his pressure on Madge’s air-pump had wavered. But Phyllis Alden had discovered it. She gave him no opportunity either for action or regret.
CHAPTER XVI
A STRANGE PEARL
Madge felt herself in a great fairy world peopled with giants. Every thing below the water is magnified a thousandfold. Slowly she went down and down! The fishes splashed and tumbled about her, hurrying to get away from this strange, new sea-monster that had come into their midst.
The little captain felt no mental sensation except one of wonder and of awe; no physical impression save a pressure as of a great weight on her head and a roaring of mighty waters in her ears. She no longer had any idea of being afraid.
At the first plunge into the water she had shut her eyes, but now, as she approached the bottom of the bay, she kept them wide open.
The water was clear as crystal, like the reflection in a mammoth mirror. She could see nearly fifty feet ahead of her. Captain Jules walked just in front of her, swinging his great body from side to side, peering down into the sandy bottom of the bay. Madge discovered that the only way in which she could get a view, except the one directly in front of her, was by turning her head inside her helmet, to look through her side window glasses. The goggles over her eyes gave her just the view that a horse has with blinkers.