will not lose a day more in sending a trustworthy person to you who
shall bring you here to rejoin your father and me. Write by the first
ship that will bring your letter. I shall not rest until I have heard
from you; and having heard in such words as my heart could wish, I
shall not sleep until you are with me, never, never to be parted from
me again as long as life itself shall last. Write, dearest
girl--write--write."

Here there was another break in the letter, and then came this
postscript.

"It is part of the penalty of life in these northern lands that for
nearly one-half of the year we are entirely cut off from intercourse
with the rest of the world, and are at the mercy of wind and sea for
that benefit during the other half. My letter has waited these seven
days for the passing of a storm before the ship that is to carry it
can sail. This interval has seen the return of the sloop that I sent
down the fiord as far as Smoky Point, but no tidings has she brought
back of the vessel your father sailed in, and no certain intelligence
has yet reached me from any other quarter. So let me not alarm you
when I add that a report has come to Reykjavik by a whaler on the
seas under Snaefell that an Irish schooner has lately been wrecked
near the mouth of some basaltic caves by Stappen, all hands being
saved, but the vessel gone to pieces, and crew and passengers trying
to make their way to the capital overland. I am afraid to fear, and
as much afraid to hope, that this may have been the ship that brought
your father; but I am fitting out an expedition to go along the coast
to meet the poor ship-broken company, for whoever they are they can
know little of the perils and privations of a long tramp across this
desolate country. If more and better news should come my way you
shall have it in its turn, but meantime bethink you earnestly whether
it is not now for you to come and to join me, and your father also,
if he should then be here, and, if not, to help me to search for him.
But it is barely just to you to ask so much without making myself
clear, though truly you must have guessed my meaning. Then, dear
Greeba, when I say 'Come,' I mean _Come to be my wife_. It sounds
cold to say it so, and such a plea is not the one my heart has
cherished; for through all these years I have heard myself whisper
that dear word through trembling lips, with a luminous vision of my
own face in your beautiful eyes before me. But that is not