oman met in one long, wild gaze. Sylvia
stretched out her white hands and smiled, and Richard Devine understood
in his turn the story of the young girl's joyless life, and knew how she
had been sacrificed.

In the great crisis of our life, when, brought face to face with
annihilation, we are suspended gasping over the great emptiness of
death, we become conscious that the Self which we think we knew so well
has strange and unthought-of capacities. To describe a tempest of
the elements is not easy, but to describe a tempest of the soul is
impossible. Amid the fury of such a tempest, a thousand memories, each
bearing in its breast the corpse of some dead deed whose influence
haunts us yet, are driven like feathers before the blast, as
unsubstantial and as unregarded. The mists which shroud our
self--knowledge become transparent, and we are smitten with sudden
lightning-like comprehension of our own misused power over our fate.

This much we feel and know, but who can coldly describe the hurricane
which thus o'erwhelms him? As well ask the drowned mariner to tell
of the marvels of mid-sea when the great deeps swallowed him and the
darkness of death encompassed him round about. These two human beings
felt that they had done with life. Together thus, alone in the very
midst and presence of death, the distinctions of the world they were
about to leave disappeared. Then vision grew clear. They felt as beings
whose bodies had already perished, and as they clasped hands their freed
souls, recognizing each the loveliness of the other, rushed tremblingly
together.

Borne before the returning whirlwind, an immense wave, which glimmered
in the darkness, spouted up and towered above the wreck. The wretches
who yet clung to the deck looked shuddering up into the bellying
greenness, and knew that the end was come.

END OF BOOK THE FOURTH

EPILOGUE.

At day-dawn the morning after the storm,
the rays of the rising sun fell upon an
object which floated on the surface of
the water not far from where the schooner
had foundered.

This object was a portion of the mainmast
head of the Lady Franklin, and entangled
in the rigging were two corpses--a man
and a woman. The arms of the man were
clasped round the body of the woman,
and her head lay on his breast.
The Prison Island appeared but as a long
low line on the distant horizon.
The tempest was over.