The girl bit her lower lip.

“I wouldn’t enjoy the pictures. Jack, thinking, thinking-”

“All right! If that’s how you feel I’ll change back into my sea clothes and go after Burns and Remmings now. You slip back home and stop your mother worrying.”

“Yes, dear, that’s best,” Mrs Wilton said in support. “You can leave the rest to Jack.”

An hour later the three launches, Edith, Gladious andIvy, crossed the bar and slid like shadows over the bay swell towards the tip of the headland and the ocean. Marion and her mother waited at home until their anxiety would permit them to wait there no longer. It was close to midnight when they walked along the road to the jetty.

There they found theSnowy, with other launches moored against the jetty, and they went aboard her and took possession of the two uncushioned anglers’ chairs. They could see nothing, but it was comforting to sit there.

The familiar sounds of the river were infinitely more soothing than the empty silence of their home-the cry of a gull, the honking of swans far up the river, now and then the plop of a small fish followed by the surface movement of heavier fish chasing it. All about them life was unseen but prolific, familiar. Outside, the ocean was as quiet as if it had been withdrawn to the very stars that gleamed in the velvety sky. From it came no sound save the faint music of surf on sand. It was not the voice of the sea they knew so well-the heavy pounding and thudding of league-long rollers.

At 2 am theEdith came in with Eddy Burns and Joe Peace on board. They reported that they had patrolled up and down Swordfish Reef without sighting theDo-me. At daybreak the two women were still on the jetty when theEdith went out again, after which they hurried home for a meal and then walked to the front of the great headland protecting the township. At noon all the searching launches returned to port. TheDo-me had not been sighted, nor could her wreckage be observed on the coast. Silently, Marion and her mother were eating lunch when Wilton entered their kitchen-living-room.