a profanation to him that the uneven planking
should know her tread; that she should be on the derelict at all was,
he felt, a working of Fate against everything that was beautiful and
graceful.

Now, as she stood there in the pallid gloom, she suggested some tall,
beautiful genius, presiding over the wrack of elemental things, facing
a more glorious future.

"How shut in everything seems!" she said, as Dan took the wheel from
her hands. He had a long fog-horn which he blew at intervals.

"We haven't seen a speck of a ship," he explained, "but now the fog is
about us there's liable to be a fleet of them in our vicinity at any
time. At least that has been my experience with fogs. It would not be
much fun to be rammed, although in our present condition I fancy it
would hurt the other vessel more than it would this."

Hour after hour they went on blindly, silently, save at such times as
Dan's raucous horn blasts went tearing through the fog. The wind had
died away. Sometimes the forward part of the vessel was hidden from
their view. Frequently it seemed distorted; strange phantom shapes
filled the deck, and the soughing of the yielding hull brought strange,
uncanny sounds to their ears.

Dan was seated on the deck, his eyes peering about on all sides, trying
to pierce the veil, every nerve taut, every sense alert. The girl
crept close beside him, so that she touched him, and there she
remained, while all the terrors of the ghostly ship arose to confront
her. The weed-hung, slimy rails and wave-bitten deck stretched away in
ever-fading perspective to the foremast where everything ended in an
amorphous blur.

There came a time when the two felt almost a part of the deep--two
mortals admitted into all the hidden evils that lurk thereon. Their
lot to witness the inception of mighty tempests; to hear great gray
waves boast of the harm they had done and the winds to plan their
rending deeds. Perhaps they themselves would be called to the work, to
deal to some proud vessel the death blow as so many derelicts have done.

Once far off there sounded a series of whistle blasts, hoarse,
tremulous notes of warning and inquiry. But as the two listened with
straining ears the sounds became more dim. Finally they ceased
altogether.

The girl eventually lost all sense of acute feeling. She sat dumb, her
undeviating eyes fastened upon Dan's face, as though in him she found
all that was tangible or normal or real. Her