Then I felt a hand laid gently on my breast and a shadow crossed between me and the sun.
"He is waking!" said a voice that sounded as sweet as the song of the skylark to my ears: "Halcro! Halcro!"
A soft hand raised my head, and then I saw, looking down into my eyes, a beautiful face, framed in a mass of waving hair that the sunlight had turned into brightest gold. It was the face of Thora Kinlay.
How Thora came to be there, leaning over me, I could not tell. My mind was in a strange confusion, and I remembered nothing of what I had gone through. But soon I heard another voice speaking to me. It was the voice of my sister Jessie.
"Halcro! Halcro!" it murmured.
"Where am I?" I asked; for I could not understand how I came to be lying in the bottom of a little sailing boat with my limbs all aching and trembling.
And Jessie and Thora were at my side--Jessie steering, and Thora holding the rope of the little lug sail. How did it all come about?
Then Jessie, bidding me lie still, told me in a few words how she and Thora had watched the race between the Curlew and the St. Magnus, standing on the high ground of the Ness point. They had seen the accident, and had immediately put out together in a little boat that was lying on the beach. They had rescued me from the upturned Curlew, where I lay in a faint, and were now making for the Lydia.
"Have they saved father?" I asked.
But the girls did not know. They had not seen anyone picked up by the St. Magnus.