Receding, the sea appeared to give up its attempt to snatch the daring ones to its breast. Ruth’s eyes and thoughts drifted away from the boy and girl on the rocks. She joyed in the beauty and power of nature revealed in that long line of thundering surf. Nowhere in all her life had she seen such surf as came beating in at the back of Monhegan.
Great men have felt the charm of it in all ages. Captain John Smith once tarried to raise a garden there. Governor Bradford of Plymouth Plantation was once there. And, at this very moment, Ruth caught a glimpse of a shock of white hair which belonged to one of the greatest inventors of modern times.
“Suppose he is sitting there watching the surf and trying to estimate the amount of power that is being wasted,” she thought with a smile.
But there was the surf again. Booming in louder than before it sent spray forty feet high on Black Head’s impregnable stronghold. There, too, were the daring ones, the boy and the wildly dancing girl.
“There! There!” she whispered tensely once more. “She is gone. The waves have her.”
Once more she was mistaken. With a scream of triumph the child emerged from the spray.
“Wish I had never seen them,” she mumbled angrily.
The death of a human being, particularly a child with all the bright glories of life before her, is something to give pause to every other human being in the world.
It did seem an unkind act of Providence that had thrust these two young people who knew so little of fear and of the sea into the presence of one who had experienced so much of the ocean’s wild terrors.
She had seen this boy and girl twice before. There had been the painful swordfishing episode. Then once, as she had guided her motor boat into the tiny harbor at Monhegan, a cry had struck her ear. She had taken it for a cry of distress. Surf had been rushing in masses of gray foam over the shoals before Monhegan. There had been something of a fog. Having caught the outlines of a green punt there in the foam, she had exclaimed: