to pieces before morning. No one would risk being the first
to take the water, and he had at last volunteered, as being the
best swimmer, on condition that Emilia should be next sent, when the
communication was established.

Two ropes were then hauled on board the vessel, a larger and a smaller.
By the flickering firelight and the rarer flashes of lightning (the rain
now falling in torrents) they saw a hammock slung to the larger rope; a
woman's form was swathed in it; and the smaller rope being made fast to
this, they found by pulling that she could be drawn towards the shore.
Those on board steadied the hammock as it was lowered from the ship, but
the waves seemed maddened by this effort to escape their might, and they
leaped up at her again and again. The rope dropped beneath her weight,
and all that could be done from shore was to haul her in as fast as
possible, to abbreviate the period of buffeting and suffocation. As she
neared the rocks she could be kept more safe from the water; faster and
faster she was drawn in; sometimes there came some hitch and stoppage,
but by steady patience it was overcome.

She was so near the rocks that hands were already stretched to grasp
her, when there came one of the great surging waves that sometimes
filled the basin. It gave a terrible lurch to the stranded vessel
hitherto so erect; the larger rope snapped instantly; the guiding rope
was twitched from the hands that held it; and the canvas that held
Emilia was caught and swept away like a shred of foam, and lost amid
the whiteness of the seething froth below. Fifteen minutes after, the
hammock came ashore empty, the lashings having parted.

The cold daybreak was just opening, though the wind still blew keenly,
when they found the body of Emilia. It was swathed in a roll of
sea-weed, lying in the edge of the surf, on a broad, flat rock near
where the young boatman had come ashore. The face was not disfigured;
the clothing was only torn a little, and tangled closely round her; but
the life was gone.

It was Philip who first saw her; and he stood beside her for a moment
motionless, stunned into an aspect of tranquility. This, then, was
the end. All his ready sympathy, his wooing tenderness, his winning
compliances, his self-indulgent softness, his perilous amiability, his
reluctance to give pain or to see sorrow,--all had ended in this. For
once, he must force even his accommodating and evasive nature to meet
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