"The day has come at last, thank God!" breathed James.
"In England, mostly at the Isle of Wight, but I'm not half such a dolphin as you are."
"Oh, well, boys have to swim, you know, and I was a boy once," Jim answered awkwardly. Presently he asked, and his voice was full of awe: "Have you ever seen the dawn--a dawn like this--before?"
When daylight came, they found they had not traveled far from the scene of the night's disaster; or, if they had, the _Jeanne D'Arc_ had drifted with them. She was still afloat, and just as the sun rose they saw her, apparently not far away, tossing rudderless to the waves. There was no sign of the ship's boats.
At the renewed miracle of light, and at sight of the yacht, Jimmy's hopes were reborn. His spirit bathed in the wonder of the day and was made strong again. The night with its horrors of struggle and its darkness was past, forgotten in the flush of hope that came with the light.
Together they struck out toward the yacht, fresh with new courage. Now that he could see plainly, Jim swam always a little behind Agatha, keeping a watchful eye. She still took the water gallantly, nose and closed mouth just topping the wave, like a spaniel. An occasional side-stroke would bring her face level to the water, with a backward smile for her companion. He gloried in her spirit, even while he feared for her strength.
It was a longer pull to the yacht than they had counted upon, a heavy tax on their powers of endurance. Jim came up to find Agatha floating on her back and put his hand under her shoulders, steadying her easily.
"I've looked toward the horizon so long, I thought I'd look up, way up, for a change," she said cheerfully. "That's where the skylarks go, when they want to sing--straight up into heaven!"
"Yes, it does, almost. But just as I thought of the skylarks, I remembered something else; something that kept haunting me in the darkness all night--
"'Master in song, good-by, good-by, Down to the dim sea-line--'
I thought something or somebody was surely lost down in 'the dim sea-line' last night."
"Who can tell? But I had a better thought than yours: Ulysses, like us, swimming over the 'wine-dark sea'! Do you remember it? 'Then two days and two nights on the resistless waves he drifted; many a time his heart faced death.'"