bringing me here thus
blindfolded, and, thanks to His mercy! I am not yet so old but I may
yet do something. So come, girl, come, make ready, and we will go on
our great errand together."

But Greeba had her own ends from the first in following Michael
Sunlocks to the place of his imprisonment, and she answered and said,

"No, father, no. You may go on to Reykjavik, and do all this if you
can, but my place is here, at my husband's side. He lost faith in my
affection, and said I had married him for the glory that his place
would bring me; but he shall see what a woman can go through for sake
of the man she loves. I have my own plan of life in this place, and
the power to carry it out. Therefore do not fear to leave me, but go,
and God prosper you!"

"Let it be so," said Adam, and with that, after some words of
explanation with the brave fellows who had followed him from the hour
when, as ship-broken men, they set out on foot from the eastern
fiord, he started on his journey afresh, leaving the tent and the
last of their ship's victuals behind with Greeba, for Reykjavik was
no more than a day's ride from Krisuvik.

When he was gone, Greeba went down to the tents at the mouth of the
mines, and asked for the Captain. A Danish gentleman who did not know
her, and whom she did not know, answered to that title, and then she
said that hearing that a hospital was being built she had come out
from Reykjavik to offer herself as a nurse if a nurse was wanted.

"A nurse _is_ wanted," said the Captain, "and though we had no
thought of a woman you have come in the nick of time."

So Greeba, under some assumed name, unknown to the contingent of
Danish officers fresh from Denmark, who had that day taken the places
of the Icelandic warders, and recognizable in her true character by
two men only in Krisuvik, Michael Sunlocks and Red Jason, if ever
they should see her, took up her employment as hospital nurse to the
sick prisoners of the Sulphur Mines.

But having attained her end, or the first part of it, her heart was
torn by many conflicting feelings. Would she meet with her husband?
Would he come to be in her own charge? Oh, God forbid that it should
ever come to pass. Yet God grant it, too, for that might help him to
a swifter release than her dear old father could compass. Would she
see Red Jason? Would Michael Sunlocks ever see him? Oh! God forbid
that also. And yet, and yet, God grant it, after all.

Such were her hopes an