Her father looked in her face, and his eyes filled with tears.
"So be it," he said; "we will die together."
"We will live, and we will save them. Let us to the work."
She hurried on her father. In the twinkling of an eye, the boat, moored in a creek, was unfastened, and launched upon the boiling waves, when a voice cried from the shore,—
"And will you leave me behind? I have a right to run the same risks with you; I wish to take my part." The mother threw herself into the bark, which rose for a moment on the menacing crest of an enormous wave, then disappeared, swallowed up in the furrow left between two mountains of water.
In the mean while, the fog lifted, and a group of shipwrecked people were seen clinging to the sharp points of a ledge of rocks upon which beat the hull of a ship, split in two.
"They come nearer," cried one of them. "O, that terrible wave has carried them farther off."
"Let us thank God for that," said the captain; "it might have dashed them against the reef."
"They will arrive too late," said a poor mother who pressed to her heart an infant already stiff and motionless with cold.
"They are making superhuman efforts," said the captain. "Courage, brave hearts!" And he raised a white handkerchief.