The wind that evening freshened out of the north-west glare of sunset. The sky thickened, and some small wings of scud flew south-east, bronzed by the western splendour dimming fast. The sea ran in a cloudy green, but without weight, in the light tropic surge.

At sundown Mr. Blundell hailed the royal yard, and the answer, hoarse in tone as a seagull's scream, was:

'Nothing in sight, sir.'

The mate ordered the man to come down on deck, and half an hour later, when darkness was on the face of the deep, and the last red scar had died out of the starless sky, the Mowbray was slopping softly through the creaming waters, under her mainsail and standing jib.

It was like being hove-to; but she had way, and when Captain Parry looked over the taffrail, he saw the cold, green lights of the sea revolving and sliding off in the short spread of yeast the nimble clipper carried with her.

It drew down a night ghastly with the pallor of the hidden moon. At about nine o'clock they burnt a flare; the crimson flames rose quivering, and the smoke drove, black as a thunder-cloud, betwixt the masts to leeward. The little ship stood out against the night fire-tinctured.

She looked, with her glowing yellow masts and fiery shrouds, to be built of flame. The night came in walls of blackness to this wild and beautiful vision, and the noise of the sea, and the sense of the infinity of the deep, that was running and seething out of sight, filled the glowing picture with an entrancing spirit of mystery. You would have said that she owed her life and light to the sea-gods.

Both Parry and the mate, whilst this flare was burning, repeatedly directed their night-glasses at the ocean, and, even whilst it burnt, a man came aft to the call of the mate and sent up a couple of rockets. The fireballs hissed, burst, and vanished in spangles, darting a lustre as of lightning across a little space of sky.

The flare crackled, leapt up, smouldered, and was extinguished by a bucket of water.

A couple of lanterns—bright globular glasses—were lighted, and hung up in the main rigging, one on each side. This brought the hour to about a quarter past ten. The sea was again searched, its ghastly face had stolen out, and the heads of the breaking billows under that thick and pallid sky were like flashes of guns in mist.

'If the lady isn't in this circle, Captain Parry,' said Mr. Blundell cheerfully, 'let's hope we'll find her in the next. If the boat's within ten miles of us they'll have seen our flare and those fireballs.'

'But we are moving through the sea,' said Captain Parry. 'If we make them a head wind, and continue to sail, how are they to fetch us?'

'The schooner's only just under command, sir. If I heave to the drift will put me out. With your kind leave I'll go below and get a glass of grog.'

They both went into the cabin, leaving a man to look out. They were waited upon by the 'boy,' who was, indeed, a young man of about eight-and-twenty, with a face full of sallow fluff, and an old man's look in his eyes and in the contraction of his brows, as though he had been born in the workhouse and knew life.

But at sea there were but three ratings, and if you don't sign articles as an able or ordinary seaman, then, if you were eighty years old, and could scarcely creep over the ship's side with your cargo of scythe and hour-glass, you'd still be called a boy.

The mate and Captain Parry sat for a little in the cabin, sipping cold brandy and water.

'Should the men in the boat see our flares and rockets,' said the captain, 'what will they think of them?'

'They'll approach us to take a look.'

'But if they make out that we are the schooner of their piracy and murders, will they come on board?'

'She's an open boat, sir, and you have to consider how men will be driven by exposure. Anyhow,' said Mr. Blundell, 'if we can only coax her this side the horizon, we may easily keep her in sight till we've worn them out.'

'I have been thinking of these red-hot skies, too. Will Miss Vanderholt be able to survive the exposure of even a day and a night?' And Captain Parry swayed in his chair with the grief of the thought.

'Well,' said the mate, with the note of a stout heart in his voice, 'only a sailor is able to tell a man what ladies really can go through. Low-class females, emigrants and the like, cave in quickly; they are the shriekers. They cannot bear terror, and it kills them on rafts and in boats. But your thoroughbred lady is always the one that I've seen, heard of, and read of, who has shown a lion's heart and the coldness of a stone head in shipwreck. If Miss Vanderholt be in the boat, you'll find that she'll have suffered less than the men.'

A faint smile stirred the lips of Captain Parry; but he grew quickly grave again, with the distress of his imaginations. At that moment a hoarse cry in the skylight made them spring to their feet.

'There's a big ship a-bearing down upon us!'

The mate rushed up the steps, followed by Captain Parry. The ghostly sheen of the moon still clouded as with steam the thickness of the night, and the scene of heaven and sea was mystical with elusive distance, with the soft near flash of the surge, and the windy chaos of the horizon.

On the bow, not half a mile distant, was a large pale shape. The night-glass made her white-hulled, with canvas to her trucks. The schooner was thrown into the wind. It was clearly the intention of the stranger to speak the Mowbray. Through the small scattering hiss of the sea on either hand you might have heard the low, constant thunder of the bow-wave of the ship as she washed through the brine, making a light for herself with her sides and white heights, but showing no lights. On a sudden the human silence was broken by a short, gruff command, weak with distance. The sound might then be heard of yards being swung; ropes crowed in blocks, parrels creaked on masts, and in a few minutes a large white ship, with the fires of the sea dripping at her cutwater, lay abreast of the schooner, all way choked out of her by the backed topsail.

'Schooner ahoy!'

'Hallo!' shouted Mr. Blundell, sending his voice far into the darkness over the ship's rail, whence the hail had proceeded.

'What's wrong with you that you are sending up rockets and burning flares?'

'We are in search of a boat. Have you met with a boat containing eight men and a lady?'

A short silence ensued.

'What schooner are you?'

'The Mowbray, of, and now for, the Thames, when we recover the boat. What ship are you?'

'The Georgina Wilde, Liverpool to Melbourne. I expect your people have been rescued. We passed a schooner's long-boat yesterday morning, and I read your name, the Mowbray, in her stern sheets.'

'If that's the case,' exclaimed Mr. Blundell quickly to Captain Parry, 'there'll be no good left in this circle job.'

'Has he no more information to give us?' said Captain Parry, with a hopeless stare at the tall, pale shadow, upon whose decks nothing was visible in that thickness save a dull, Will-o'-the-wisp-like glimmer where the binnacle stand stood.

The schooner was hailed again.

'Hallo!' answered Blundell.

'We sighted a derelict yesterday at noon. She was within a mile or two of the long-boat. Looked like a small brig, timber-laden.'

'How would she bear from us now?' bawled the mate.

It was plain, from the stillness that followed, that the man with the powerful hoarse voice had walked to his compass-stand to consider the required bearings. A midnight hush came down upon the deep then, spite of the plash and gurgle of waters in motion, and of a dull song of wind up aloft in the rigging of the schooner.

Now it was that a single shaft of moonlight glanced through a rift down upon the sea, flashing up the rolling head of a surge into a melting hill of silver. The night seemed to sweep with a deeper dye of blackness from either hand that pure crystal ray. Yet it made a light, too. It gave substance and firmness to the visionary ship abeam.

Captain Parry saw a figure coming along the deck from the binnacle to the rail to hail. He also perceived figures of seamen on the short topgallant forecastle; likewise he beheld the bowsprit and jibbooms forking out like a huge spear, poised for hurling in the grasp of a giant, and betwixt that extreme point of jibboom and masthead floated symmetric clouds of soft whiteness; but the moonbeam was eclipsed in a few moments, and the white ship sank back into a vision, glimmering and scarce determinable.

Again the schooner was hailed.

'The bearings of the derelict,' shouted the voice, in tones of the volume of a speaking-trumpet, 'will be north-west by north half north, about. Don't take this as if it was an observation. Try about forty mile on that course, and if nothing heaves into view, sweep the sea. The derelict's bound to be afloat. Farewell! Good luck attend you!' Then, a minute later, 'Swing the main topsail yard! Ease away your weather main braces!'

The pale and lofty shadow leaned from the damp night breeze, and the water trembled into fire along the visionary length of her, when, with a soft stoop of her bow to some invisible heave of the ocean, she broke her way onwards, dissolving quickly into the night.

'About forty miles distant,' said Mr. Blundell, stepping to the compass. 'Shall we head on a course for her, sir?'

'Oh, most certainly!' answered Captain Parry.

'Better jog along under easy canvas, till it comes daylight, anyhow,' said the mate.

The course was shifted, sail trimmed, the gaff foresail was set, and the schooner, carrying the midnight breeze abeam, slided soundless through the gloom over the black, wide swell of the sea.

Captain Parry was too anxious to take rest. He lighted a cheroot, and paced the deck with Mr. Blundell, who had heroically resolved not to turn in that night—not to turn in at all until the timber-laden derelict had been sighted, boarded and rummaged.

They kept the lanterns burning in the rigging. They never knew how it might be with the eight men and the lady, supposing the lady with them. It is true that the long-boat had been fallen in with adrift; but then, as Mr. Blundell put it, 'That might be due to an accident, without signifying that they'd been received on board a ship, and their boat let go.'

'My own view's this, sir,' said he, as he lighted one of Parry's cheroots at the glowing tip of the Captain's. 'The men saw that timber craft, and being scorched with the heat, and wild with cramp, they resolved to make for the shelter of it, where they could stretch their arms and take the kinks out of their legs. The painter which held the boat slipped, and she drifted softly off, and when they saw that she was gone she was a dozen ships' lengths distant. They could do nothing, aboard a drowned timberman with empty davits, and a list of perhaps forty degrees, but let her go. That's my notion. We shall find all hands aboard. If so, what will you wish me to do, sir?'

'Bring them into this schooner,' answered Captain Parry. 'If they have murdered Miss Vanderholt, they shall swing for it, by God!'

'But pray consider this, sir,' said Mr. Blundell coolly. 'They are eight men, daring, defiant devils, no doubt, bullies in the alley, jolly examples of your Jack Muck. We are seven. To bring them on board we should be obliged to fetch them. But, sir, we can't leave the schooner deserted. She might run away from us. She got her liberty once, and the appearance of the derelict might excite her appetite afresh for freedom.'

'For God's sake, Mr. Blundell,' broke in Captain Parry, 'don't joke!'

'I mean, sir,' continued Mr. Blundell, in a voice that did him some honour, as it proved he could be abashed, 'that we should have to leave three of our people to look after the schooner, so that we should go four to eight in order to fetch them.'

'We are armed,' exclaimed Captain Parry.

'Two pistols,' said the mate.

'We must bring them aboard—we must bring them aboard!' cried Captain Parry, in a voice that almost shouted with nerve. 'Will they be content,' he went on after a hard suck or two at his cigar, 'to continue washing about in a wreck that might spread under them at any minute like a pack of cards when they see a schooner alongside willing to receive them?'

'To be hanged, sir.'

'Who's to tell them that till we've got them under hatches?' said Captain Parry.

'They know this craft,' said Blundell, in a note of gloom. 'It'll be a job. Eight of 'em, and only four of us. It'll take us all we know.'

Captain Parry belonged to a fighting profession. When he talked of boarding the timberman and bringing off the eight men, his imagination was a little confused. He brandished a sword in fancy; he was followed by a number of smart men in red coats, and with fixed bayonets. He did not quite gather that, if he headed the boarders, he should be leading into glory three timid seamen who were entirely averse to selling their lives at any price. Moreover, Captain Parry was not a sailor. He could not imagine how difficult it is to gain the deck of a ship whose people do not want you. These eight men would, in a deck cargo of timber, find plenty of materials fit for knocking out the bottom of a boat, and the brains of those who should venture their noses above the rail.

But it was an idle argument betwixt him and the mate. Were they going to find the half-foundered brig? Would the eight men be in her? Would Miss Vanderholt be amongst them?

At daybreak nothing was visible in the telescope from the fore royal yard. The weather had cleared in the night. It was a strange, mountainous morning of huge swollen cloud, whose sun-bright bellies amazingly whitened the silver of that ocean. Now and again, round about the horizon, a spark of lightning flashed in the heart of a violet shadow of vapour, and now and again a low note of thunder, distant, tremulous as an organ strain, rolled across the sea, as though some huge, deep-throated beast, big as a hill, and couchant behind the horizon, was being worried.

There was breeze enough to keep the schooner's sails full, and sunrise found the Mowbray pursuing the course of the night. Captain Parry refreshed himself with a bucket of cold green brine, and tried to make some breakfast. Mr. Blundell ate heartily, and again, as they sat at table, they argued upon the course to adopt should they find the eight seamen on the wreck.

'If they've got Miss Vanderholt with them,' said the mate, 'I should recommend asking them to allow us to receive her aboard—we leaving them aboard the wreck to be taken off by the next thing that passes.'

'I like that idea,' said Captain Parry; 'it would save bloodshed. We want nothing but the young lady. They should be glad to get easily rid of her as a witness. If they are short of food, we can supply them with stores enough to keep them going for a time that would allow of a reasonable chance of their being rescued.'

'They'll want provisions, anyhow,' said the mate. 'Stove timbermen float on their cargo. You need to dive to get at the grub in those derelicts. I'm counting upon hunger courting them into the schooner without obliging us to try what coaxing them with four men and two pistols is going to do.'

They went on deck, and stared at the sea-line through glasses. A little before noon, just at the moment when Mr. Blundell was coming out of his cabin with his sextant, a man stationed aloft on the look-out hailed him.

'What is it?' shouted Blundell, springing through the companion-hatch.

'There is a black object away down upon the port-bow. It looks like a boat.'

'How does it bear on the bow?' cried Blundell to the little figure aloft, a sailor with a face set in black whiskers.

He looked to tremble in the heat up there, and his shape, as he stood erect to the height of the truck, seemed shot with the lights of several dyes, and against a swollen heap of cloud past him he showed like a coloured daguerreotype.

'About two points,' was his answer.

Mr. Blundell shifted his helm for it, but, whatever it might be, it was not yet visible from the deck. The mate got an observation of the sun, and went below to work it out. When he returned he found Captain Parry examining a dark object on the bow with a telescope.

'It's a ship's boat most unquestionably,' said the captain, turning to Mr. Blundell.

The mate was at this instant hailed afresh from the masthead.

'There's another dark object about a point on the weather-bow,' said the fellow dangling high in air, his hoarse voice softening in falls as it reached the ear from the hollows of the sails. 'She'll be the wreck, sir,' he howled, after working away with his glass.

Captain Parry was as pale as the dawn with excitement and expectation.

'I vow to God,' said he, bringing his fist down on the rail, 'I would certainly lose my left arm with cheerfulness to know at this instant that Miss Vanderholt is alive and well in the wreck!'

'If she is with them they'll all come aboard together,' said the mate, with scarce conscious dryness. 'Hunger and thirst will work their way with beasts, let alone men.'

Little more was said whilst the schooner, driven by a five-knot breeze, swept in long floating launches down upon the boat that came and went. There had been wind somewhere, and a small swell rolled in from the westward, running lightning flashes through the water. No man could say it was the Mowbray's long-boat till they had luffed and shaken the wind out of the schooner close alongside the little fabric. Then her identity was settled by a single glance at her through the glass. The yacht's name, 'Mowbray—London,' was painted in large black letters in the stern-sheets.

'Stand by to hook her,' shouted the mate.

A seaman aft, jumping for a boathook in one of the quarter-boats, sprang into the little ledge of the main chains. The schooner was slightly manoeuvred; the boat was brought close alongside and captured. She was as empty and dry as an old cocoanut-shell.

'What does that signify?' said Captain Parry.

'One of two things, clearly,' answered Blundell. 'Either they have carried all the stores they left the yacht with aboard the wreck, or the ship that picked them up emptied her before sending her adrift.'

'Would they let a valuable boat like that go?'

The mate shrugged his shoulders. There are some questions concerning the sea which even a sailor cannot answer.

'Do you see that her long painter is trailing overboard?' exclaimed Captain Parry. 'Does it not look as if the knot had unhitched and let her slip away?'

'But from what, sir? That trailing length of rope might as easily mean that she was let slip from a ship, as that she slipped of her own accord from a wreck.'

This talk, uttered swiftly, occupied a minute, whilst they overhung the rail, looking into the boat alongside.

'We must have her out of that,' said the mate, 'and restore her.'

The man who was hanging to her by the boathook, turning up a face as dark as a new bronze coin, exclaimed:

'There's something white right aft, jammed away down under them stern-sheets.'

It was immediately wanted, of course, but the man with the boathook could not get it and keep a hold of the boat, too; so another man jumped in and brought up a pocket-handkerchief.

'It's a lady's,' said the mate.

'It's Miss Vanderholt's!' exclaimed Captain Parry, observing a small 'V. V.' in the corner.

Two or three marks of blood stained it, as though the lip, nose, or ear had slightly bled.

'What does it betoken?' said Captain Parry, looking at the handkerchief, and speaking softly, as though to himself. 'If it is a memorial, why, in God's name, should it come to me blood-stained?'

They got the boat aboard; all hands, including Parry, pulling and hauling at the tackles. When she was chocked, a course was shaped for the derelict brig, according to the indication of the masthead man. It was a time of thrilling anxiety for Parry. The handkerchief was no warrant that the girl had been in the boat. They might have bound her, and drowned her at the side of the schooner, and yet a handkerchief of hers might have found its way into the boat. The handkerchief, then, proved nothing. Nevertheless, Parry found a sinister significance in the blood-marks. Was not this blood-stained token most tragically portentous, as the only relic or memorial of his love that the sea had to offer him? He looked at it, and in the wildness of his heart he made a meaning of it: it was a farewell to him, a message mute and eloquent; it said to him that her father was slain, and that she was lost to him for ever. Thus he stood interpreting the thing.

Shortly after one o'clock the derelict was in view right ahead. The telescope then easily resolved her. She was a small black brig, with her lower masts standing and bowsprit gone. She sat tolerably high, but rolled with the sickly sluggishness of the waterlogged hulk. As the schooner approached, features of the wreck grew plain. She carried a deck-load of timber, and her hold was evidently full of timber. By some desperate gale she had been wrenched till her butts started, her strong fastenings gave, her topmasts went, and the green seas rushing in, drowned her into a lifelessness of helm.

On board the schooner they could perceive no wreckage floating near. What sufferings, obscure and horrible, was that little wreck memorializing? The phantoms of the imagination peopled her. White-faced men, dying in squatting postures, were upon the sea-broken deck-load of timber. There was no captain, no command, the fingers of famine had effaced distinctions. Then one would die with a groan, falling sideways with his white eyes glazing to the sun; and another would mutter in delirium, and call upon the Lord Jesus Christ, and motion with a ghastly smile to his mother to make haste with the drink of water she was bringing him.

Phantoms or no phantoms, all were gone. The wreck lay apparently lifeless, absolutely abandoned, a yawning frame, sodden by weeks of washing to and fro. Thus it seemed to the eyes aboard the schooner as she drew closer and closer to the desolate, mournful, storm-broken fabric.

'There may be rats in that vessel,' said the mate, with a countenance made up of relief and extreme curiosity; 'but I don't see them, Captain Parry, neither do I see anything else that's living.'

'A ship has taken them off,' said Captain Parry, in a tone of hopeless misery; 'and it may be months and years before I find out what is the fate of Miss Vanderholt.'

They were now within a musket-shot of the wreck. The yacht's way was arrested, and she seemed to stand at gaze, with her people staring. The long swell swung a dismal roll into the lifeless hull. A raffle of rigging lay over her sides, and whenever she rolled away she tore this gear up from the water as if it had been sea-plants whose roots were a thousand fathoms deep; it rose hissing to the drag, and sank, like baffled snakes, when she came wearily over again. It made the heart sick to watch her, to figure one's self as alone upon her; the loose timbers clattering through the long, black night, the dark water welling in sobs alongside, the awful and soul-subduing spirit of stillness that lies in the sea when its billows are silent, as though the hush in the central heart of the profound rose like an emanation of wind or vapour, taking the senses of the lonely one with the maddening undertones of spiritual utterance.

Mr. Blundell continued to view the wreck through a glass. Captain Parry stood beside him with tightly-folded arms, death-white with grief and the sickness of disappointment, and silent.

'There is nobody aboard that vessel, sir.'

'I fear not,' the captain answered in a low voice.

'The only place where people could find shelter,' said the mate, 'is in that little green deck-house. If there were eight men sitting in the house, one would have seen us, and all have tumbled out long ago.'

'The long-boat has told us the story,' said the captain. 'They have been taken on board another vessel. Is Miss Vanderholt with them?'

He started as to a sudden access of temper and determination, and said:

'Blundell, give me two of your men, and lower that boat. I'll board the brig. I may find something to give us a clue.'

'Put one of the revolvers in your pocket, sir,' said Mr. Blundell.

A boat was lowered, and two men and Captain Parry, armed, entered her. All was lifeless aboard the wreck. It would have been ridiculous, then, to suspect an ambush. She had old-fashioned channels, platforms by which her lower rigging was extended and secured to dead-eyes. These platforms remained. The hulk would souse them, hissing, and lift them seething and streaming, but through long intervals they would sway dry with pendulum regularity.

'The main chains will be your only chance, sir,' said one of the seamen. 'Am I to go on board with ye?'

'If you will.'

'Then, Tom, when we're out of it, shove off for God's sake, and keep her clear of them chains. If they come down upon you, your life and the boat ain't worth a drowned cockroach.'

Watching his chance with great patience, Captain Parry sprang. He stumbled; but a wild flourish of his arm brought his hand safely to an iron belaying-pin in the rail above. He seized another hard by, and, lifting his knees to the rail, gained the deck.

He stood holding on. The peculiar jerky rolling of the hull threatened to throw him, until a minute or two of sympathetic feeling into the life of the fabric should have put some government of it into his legs. The sailor had easily followed.

Captain Parry was looking at the forepart of the vessel, which was a horrible litter and muddle of heaped-up timber and smashed caboose, when his companion muttered in his ear in a low growl:

'My God, master, there's a living man!'

A living man it was, standing right in the door of the deck-house. He was a seaman, and carried a strange face to those who looked at him, though one might have said he should be familiar enough to anybody belonging to the schooner Mowbray. He was James Jones, the boatswain of the yacht. His cheeks were gaunt and grimy, and his eyes blazed in their hollows. His hair lay in streaks over his ears, and down the back of his head, as though to repeated greasy tuggings and pullings. He was without his coat, and his great muscular arms were bare to above the elbow.

Captain Parry recoiled a step, thrusting his hand into the pocket where the pistol lay. He suspected this man to be one of the eight, and that the seven would burst out in a minute.

'I'm damned if ye ain't come just in the nick of time!' said Jones; and his grin, and exhibition of yellow fangs, and his dirty skin and flaming eyes, made his face horrible. 'I tell ye what I've just found out. There ain't no death! "How do I know that?" says you. Why, ye see, a man ain't dead till he dies, and when he's dead death ain't got no existence for him. D'ye see it?' said he with an inimitable leer.

Captain Parry saw that he was mad, but in the moment of detecting this he observed something more. Behind the madman, looking over his shoulders, stood Miss Vanderholt. She was robed in white, and wore a small straw hat. She was pale, as though exhausted, perhaps from the want of food or drink; otherwise, but for her impassioned transforming gaze, she looked as though she had but now come with Captain Parry to view the wreck.

'Oh, Violet, my dear one! Violet, I have found you!' cried Parry, and he rushed towards her.

She shrieked, standing still and clasping her hands, and looking up to God.

'There's no admission 'ere!' roared the madman, barricading the door by extending his arms. 'This is a royal yacht. Why don't you cast your eyes aloft and view the Royal Standard a-flying? The Princess Victoria is within. Didn't I know her gracious mother, the Duchess? I'm an English sailor, and I'm loyal to my native country. God save the King!'

Saying which, he turned and bowed with every mark of profound veneration to Miss Vanderholt.

'Let me pass, man!' cried Captain Parry, pulling out his revolver and hustling the powerful fellow.

'Hide it!' screamed Violet; 'he is mad! He has been kind to me! Oh, my God! George, am I dreaming? Is it you in the flesh, or am I mad, too?'

She put her hands to her eyes, and reeled to a stanchion, against which she leaned. The madman continued to barricade the door, both huge arms extended.

'Look here,' cried Parry, almost as mad as the seaman he confronted, with impatience, infuriated by this hellish lunatic obstruction, wild to clasp the girl, whose reel and motion of hands had stabbed his heart; 'we want to get at this young lady at once, to take her on board yonder schooner. Make way, for God's sake! I'll hear all about your views on death when we're comfortable aboard that vessel.'

'There's no blooming man,' shouted the madman, 'a-going to approach the Princess Victoria without falling down upon his bended knees and crawling to her feet, as the custom is at St. James's Palace!'

Miss Vanderholt went into hysterics. She shrieked with laughter; she sobbed as if her heart was breaking.

'I think you'd better go down upon your knees, sir,' said the sailor who had accompanied Parry. 'Here, my lad,' said he, crooking his finger into a fish-hook at the man, 'you just make way for the gent to crawl to her Gracious 'Ighness, and whilst he's kow-towing, give me that there yarn of yourn about death.'

He winked at the captain, who sank upon his knees. The scene was grotesque, tragic, extraordinary. The boatswain watched the figure of the captain with fiery suspicion whilst he passed on all fours through the door of the deck-house. Miss Vanderholt was still in hysterics.

'Damn the ruffian! I can't stand it!' shouted the captain, and he sprang to his feet and clasped the girl.

But the madman had begun to state his queer paradox with fearful earnestness to the seaman, who had fixed him with a stare, and was, with singular judgment in a common fool of a drunken sailor, drawing him out of sight of the couple.

Miss Vanderholt lay in her lover's arms, weeping and laughing; but a few kisses and murmurs of devotion produced a very good effect. She controlled herself, and then they were able to talk in swift questions and eager answers. Outside the madman continued to argue with the sailor on the subject of death.

'There ain't no death!' he roared, with all the strength of his throat. 'D'ye call it a good job, mate? Here stands the man as has got rid of the terror of the world. Hark you, bully! Ye can turn in now without fearing to die. It'll do away with prayers, for there ain't no death!'

Thus he raved, whilst inside, the girl, in the embrace of her sweetheart, talked in a score of feverish questions and answers. She was white, but clearly not from want of food. Up in a corner of the deck-house stood a little load of tins of meat and biscuit, removed from the Mowbray's hold by her revolted men. In another corner was the long-boat's big breaker, and a pannikin at hand for a drink.

'Let's get away from this wreck,' said Parry, clasping the girl's hand. 'Yet, what a wonderful meeting!' he cried, devouring her with his eyes. 'What a miraculous deliverance! Oh, the hand of God is in it, and I am grateful—I am grateful!'

They moved towards the door, and the madman saw them coming.

'Look here,' he cried, making for them in a jump or two, with an air so menacing that Parry's hand instantly sought his pistol. 'No man walks alongside the Princess Victoria aboard this Royal yacht. Her 'Ighness the Duchess taught me how to behave myself in the eye of Royalty when I was a young un, and this is how it's done,' said he, giving Captain Parry a shove that drove him some feet from Miss Vanderholt; then, stepping in front of the girl, he bowed low, with all those marks of abject veneration which had distinguished his former obeisance, and saying, 'If your Royal 'Ighness will now step out,' he moved backwards.

But a long plank lay athwart his path; the captain and the seaman saw what was to happen; the madman fell heavily backwards over it.

'Bring the boat alongside, Jim!' bawled the sailor. 'This is the Ryle yacht. See the Standard a-flying? The Princess Victoria is aboard, and we've got to back her into the boat according to the custom of the Court of St. James's Palace.'

The boatswain was up again, and, flourishing his hand, he cried:

'Right!'

'You leave him to me, sir,' said the sailor, with a half-wink at Captain Parry, who was absolutely at a loss.

He would not for a million have shot the unhappy madman, and yet he durst not approach Miss Vanderholt whilst that huge and brawny lunatic watched him.

The seaman in the boat concluded that his shipmate had lost his mind.

'What the blooming blazes,' he thought to himself, 'is Bill a-jawing about, with his Ryle yachts and Ryle Standards?'

And he looked right up into the sky.

'Stand by now, Tom, to receive her Ryle 'Ighness!' shouted the sailor, with a glance at the madman. 'As her 'Ighness must go first, there's no harm, I hope,' said he, 'in her walking face foremost?'

'She always do,' shouted the boatswain. 'Bow her to the rail, and hand her over.'

Nothing could have been better. The swell gave them a good deal of trouble, but two of them were sailors, and presently Miss Vanderholt was in the boat. Captain Parry sprang into the chains, and, watching his opportunity, leapt, and was by his sweetheart's side in a minute.

The madman overhung the rails, staring greedily. He knuckled his brow as one who would drive a pain out of his brain, then began to laugh when Captain Parry jumped into the boat.

'Bring him along, Bill. You lay he'll know what to do!' cried the sailor in the boat.

'Her Ryle 'Ighness commands you to attend her, sir,' said the seaman. 'Step right over the side into the chains, and don't jump back'ards.'

The boatswain drew himself stiffly erect, and, after gazing aloft at the vision of the Standard, which blew in rich folds under the swelling clouds to his insane eye, he exclaimed:

'Who's going to look after her Royal 'Ighness's yacht if I leave her?'

'She'll lie quiet enough, mate, till you return,' said the sailor. 'Hark! Her Ryle 'Ighness is a-calling of you.'

'Pray attend upon me! I command your presence in this boat!' cried the girl in the loudest, most imperious voice her condition would permit her to manage.

The poor creature bowed low over the rail, then in silence dropped into the chains, followed by the sailor, and in a minute or two both were seated in the boat.

All went quietly. The boatswain shifted restlessly in his seat, with a grin of stupefaction. His burning eyes rolled over the Mowbray, and again and again he pulled his hair with hands that sweated like tallow.

Miss Vanderholt's first exclamation, when she was handed over the side, was, 'My father! my poor father!' And she began to cry. The dreadful scene rose before her mental vision, and she shook with old sensations of terror.

Captain Parry, passing his arm through hers, gently and tenderly led her below. She had been too much moved to address Mr. Blundell, and for a little while she needed the privacy of the cabin and her lover's company. Presently, whilst they sat below, she told Captain Parry the story of the mutiny, and her adventures down to this hour.

It seems that some of the men were for going away at once in the long-boat, after scuttling the yacht; others were for letting her lie afloat; but all were agreed that she must be abandoned. Then Miss Vanderholt found out that they were undecided what they should do with her. Most of them, she gathered, were for leaving her in the yacht, to take her chance of being picked up.

'Why not?' said they. 'We can shorten sail for her before we leave. We can lash the helm amidships. She's got plenty to eat and drink. She can't come to hurt in these waters, and is bound to be rescued.'

But the boatswain, who had grown ferocious in temper, and had manifested many symptoms of insanity, swore that she should not be abandoned to her fate. She was an Englishwoman; he was an English seaman. By God! he would brain any man who talked of leaving the poor young lady alone to wash about in the schooner.

She told Captain Parry that this Jones overawed the men, and they seemed to treat him as though his madness made him superior to themselves. They all left in the long-boat. The boatswain next morning went quite mad, and took Miss Vanderholt to be the Princess Victoria. He bowed humbly to her in the boat; he would sometimes kneel to her. He whipped a straw hat off a man's head to shade her with.

His hallucination was, fortunately, a sober one. He supposed the men to be the crew of the cutter of some Royal yacht or other, and himself in command, seeking the vessel that her Gracious Highness, as he frequently called her, might sail round the world. A man cut his finger in opening a tin, and the young lady gave him her handkerchief to bind the wound. He left it in the boat.

When they fell in with the derelict they were exhausted with the scorching heat and the exposure by night, and determined to take shelter and rest aboard, and signal for help, if help should heave into view. They emptied the long-boat; but that same evening of their entering the derelict, about an hour before sundown, a small brigantine leisurely came flapping down upon them, and seven men entered the long-boat and rowed for her, leaving the boatswain and the young lady to their fate.

Not until long afterwards was it discovered that this brigantine was a Frenchman, that her crew had mutinied, and sent her captain and mate adrift, and that, though they perceived the figures of the boatswain and the young lady on the brig, yet, on the Mowbray's men telling them that one could bear witness to the mutiny, and that the other was a dangerous madman, they put their helm up and sailed away.

Before the set of sun the Mowbray was heeling to a fresh breeze; every cloth that could draw was driving her cutwater through it, and her clipper-stem rose the white brine raving to her hawse-pipes. She seemed, like those on board, to have got the scent, and to know that she was going home.

THE END.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.