Two cousins, both christened Cora Virginia Lander and alike enough to pass for sisters, are sailing home from school in Europe with rich Amos Lander when the steamer catches fire in mid-ocean. Cora saves herself by leaping for the first boat; Virginia stays with her father to the end and is pulled from the sea an orphan. Back on the Lander estate the will and the two identical names give Cora an idea about which girl is the daughter, and she is ready to disown her own mother to carry it through; the handsome stranger Horace Seymour, with money and a past under another name, suits her plans very well. Ann Stephens wrote Malaeska, the first of Beadle's dime novels, and kept serial readers turning pages for half a century. Sixty marine plates by Winslow Homer and Ivan Aivazovsky, from night coasts to ocean swells, follow the drowning and the rescue that set the whole deception adrift.
