ast terrible fright, she clung to him, and thus--
their lips washed by the phosphorescent brine of the tropical ocean, in
the extreme moment of their peril--they kissed. Gently, but forcibly,
parting her grasp, Roden raised his head, and sent forth over the waste
of waters a long, piercing, pealing shout. Then, sliding from the raft,
he sank.

The hatch, relieved of his weight, rose immediately, floating square
upon the surface, the dark wood framing its white burden in its midst.
But the moments vent by, and still no hideous stain rose to empurple the
green translucent plain of liquid light. Had the dauntless resolution
of his sacrifice carried him down into immeasurable depths, whither even
the ravening sea-tigers did not penetrate? It seemed so. "Love! love!
where are you?" whispered Mona, her exhausted voice wild with alarm.
And then such a curdling, piercing shriek rang out over the immensity of
space as even to surpass that call for help uttered with the last breath
of a dying man. "Love! love! you have given your life for mine! O God!
O God! take mine, for it is worthless to me now!"

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE.

CONCLUSION.

"We therefore commit her body to the deep..."

The voice of the captain of the _Launceston Castle_ takes on more than
the ordinary solemnity which almost invariably comes into the voice of
the nonprofessional reader of that most solemn office, the Burial of the
Dead at Sea. The demeanour, too, of his audience--officers, crew,
passengers alike--is more than ordinarily solemn, while many of the
female portion of it are sobbing aloud. There is something so pathetic,
so heart-rending in this last stage of a terrible drama of the sea--the
only survivor of a terrible tragedy being thus cast up in their midst:
this royally beautiful form, a noble embodiment of youth and health and
grace, found floating, lashed to the ring-bolts of a ship's hatch; alone
in the immensity of ocean; rescued from the deep, only to return
immediately to the deep again. For Mona is dead. Her overwhelming
agony of grief, combined with her recent terrors and exhaustion, had
done its work; and no sooner had they safely lifted her to the deck of
the _Launceston Castle_ than the spirit fled, leaving a name trembling
upon the lips of its forsaken tenement, and that name they who stood by
could hear.

Yet it was a name which, coupled with many a passionate adjuration, had
been heard already and many times by some.