Nor was I prompted to lie
through fear. I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in that boiling
surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer. It was
impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore. The wind would
instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it the moment it fell
into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed to the spare oars,
dragged in the sea ahead of us.

As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundred
yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die.
My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks, and
it was too terrible. I strove to compel myself to think we would make
the landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what I
preferred to believe.

I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a moment
I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leaping
overboard. Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we
entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my
love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle and
die.

Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat. I felt
her mittened hand come out to mine. And thus, without speech, we waited
the end. We were not far off the line the wind made with the western
edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the
current or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached the
surf.

"We shall go clear," I said, with a confidence which I knew deceived
neither of us.

"By God, we _will_ go clear!" I cried, five minutes later.

The oath left my lips in my excitement--the first, I do believe, in my
life, unless "trouble it," an expletive of my youth, be accounted an
oath.

"I beg your pardon," I said.

"You have convinced me of your sincerity," she said, with a faint smile.
"I do know, now, that we shall go clear."

I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory,
and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what was
evidently a deep cove. At the same time there broke upon our ears a
continuous and mighty bellowing. It partook of the magnitude and volume
of distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward, rising above
the crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.
As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of
white s