warm, passionate embrace, and their lips, wet with the salt brine, again
met and clung.

"Love, love!" she whispered. "What a sweet word that is, since it can
turn to sweetness and light such an awful position as that in which we
now are. For I know the peril of our position--know it and realise it
to the full. Coward that I was to let you go as I did. No wonder you
turned from me with scorn and loathing, you who alone taught me what
love really was. But I will not let you go again. We will live
together or die together. We will not be separated again. We will
not--we will not!"

In truth the scene was a passing strange one, a marvel. Her voice
warmed and quivered with tenderness, and the smile which curved her lips
and threw a melting lustre into her eyes was radiant, as though those
words were uttered in peaceful security with a lifetime of happiness
opening out before her--before them both. Yet, half submerged, upborne
by the frailest of supports, they two were floating out upon the
stupendous expanse of dusking waters--drear, solemn, silent--horrible in
their awesome loneliness as in the far back ages of the world's birth,
while yet darkness brooded over the face of the deep.

Thus closed the first day.

Then, as the blackness of night fell, a faint breeze stirred the water,
and there came a change, one of weird and unearthly splendour. In their
countless myriads the stars sprang forth, and great constellations
gushed redly through the spheres, throwing a revolving ray athwart the
lesser luminaries in the transcendent brilliance and beauty of a
tropical sky. Roseate meteors, too, falling in streaks, and lo, the
whole surface of the sea blazed with phosphoric incandescence.

And the effect was wondrous, for bathed from head to foot in the
phosphorescent flame, clothed, as it were, in shining clusters of stars,
Mona's splendid form was as that of some inexpressibly beautiful goddess
of the sea; the oblong of the planking whereon it rested framing her as
with a golden glory. And stirred by the cool night breeze, the gentle
lapping of the ripples rose and fell in strange musical cadence as of
the far-away sighings of a spirit world, varied ever and anon by the
gasping snort of some mysterious monster of the deep.

Dawn rose at last--the dawn of the second day. Of how many more days
would they behold the dawn, these two, cut off from the world, from all
human help? How many more days before languor,