t of it.

"How is the lady passenger?" Thurstane could not help whispering.

"Guess she's asleep, sah," returned the negro. "Fus-rate sailor, sah. But
them greasers is having tough times," he grinned. "Can't abide the sea,
greasers can't, sah."

Smiling with a grim satisfaction at this last statement, Thurstane gave
the man a five-dollar piece, muttered, "Call me if anything goes wrong,"
and slipped into his narrow dormitory. Without undressing, he lay down and
tried to sleep; but, although it was past midnight, he stayed broad awake
for an hour or more; he was too full of thoughts and emotions to find easy
quiet in a pillow. Near him--yes, in the very next stateroom--lay the
being who had made his life first a heaven and then a hell. The present
and the past struggled in him, and tossed him with their tormenting
contest. After a while, too, as the plunging of the brig increased, and he
heard renewed sounds of disaster on deck, he began to fear for Clara's
safety. It was a strange feeling, and yet a most natural one. He had not
ceased to love; he seemed indeed to love her more than ever; to think of
her struggling in the billows was horrible; he knew even then that he
would willingly die to save her. But after a time the incessant motion
affected him, and he dozed gradually into a sound slumber.

Hours later the jerking and pitching became so furious that it awakened
him, and when he rose on his elbow he was thrown out of his berth by a
tremendous lurch. Sitting up with his feet braced, he listened for a
little to the roar of the tempest, the trampling feet on deck, and the
screaming orders. Evidently things were going hardly above; the storm was
little less than a tornado. Seriously anxious at last for Clara--or, as he
tried to call her to himself, Miss Van Diemen--he stole out of his room,
clambered or fell up the companionway, opened the door after a struggle
with a sea which had just come inboard, got on to the quarter-deck, and,
holding by the shrouds, quailed before a spectacle as sublime and more
terrible than the Great Canon of the Colorado.

It was daylight. The sun was just rising from behind a waste of waters; it
revealed nothing but a waste of waters. All around the brig, as far as the
eye could reach, the Pacific was one vast tumble of huge blue-gray,
mottled masses, breaking incessantly in long, curling ridges, or lofty,
tossing steeps of foam. Each wave was composed of scores of ordinary
waves, just a