moment, to the head
of the sail and stooped again to peer under the foot of it into the
darkness ahead. He braced himself, with one foot against the thwart,
to haul in a few inches of sheet, to which the clumsy boat answered
immediately. Marie was praying aloud now, and when she opened her eyes
the sight of the tossing figure in the stern of the boat suddenly turned
her terror into anger.

"Ah!" she cried, "that Jean is a fool. And he, who pretends to have been
a fisherman when he was young--to let us come to our deaths like this!"

She lifted her head, and ducked it again, as a sea jumped up under the
bow and rattled into the boat.

"I see no ship," she cried. "Let us go back, if we can. Name of God!--we
shall be drowned! I see no ship, I tell you!"

"But I do," answered Barebone, shaking the water from his face, for he
had no hand to spare. "But I do, which is more important. And you are
not even wet!"

And he laughed as he brought the boat up into the wind for a few
seconds, to meet a wild gust. Juliette turned in surprise at the sound
of his voice. In the safe and gentle seclusion of the convent-school no
one had thought to teach her that death may be faced with equanimity by
others than the ordained of the Church, and that in the storm and stress
of life men laugh in strange places and at odd times.

Loo was only thinking of his boat and watching the sky for the last of
the storm--that smack, as it were, in the face--with which the Atlantic
ends those black squalls that she sends us, not without thunder and the
curtailed lightning of northern seas. He was planning and shaping his
course; for the watchers on board "The Last Hope" had already seen him,
as he could ascertain by a second light, which suddenly appeared, swung
low, casting a gleam across the surf-strewn water, to show him where the
ladder hung overside.

"Tell Monsieur de Gemosac that I have Mademoiselle and her maid here
in the boat," Barebone called out to Captain Clubbe, whose large face
loomed above the lantern he was holding overside, as he made fast the
rope that had been thrown across his boat and lowered the dripping sail.
The water was smooth enough under the lee of "The Last Hope," which,
being deeply laden, lay motionless at her anchor, with the stream
rustling past her cables.

"Stand up, mademoiselle," said Barebone, himself balanced on the
after-thwart. "Hold on to me, thus, and when I let you go, let yourself
go."

There was n