"Yes; it must have been the Easting Ban upon which she struck—that's a sunken rock quite near this holme. But I can't think what light it was you saw. You see the land on Lunda is very low along the sound, and there are only a very few people living on my island—that is Boden there; the light couldn't have been there."
The sailor raised himself on an elbow and looked at the cliffs of Boden, and the sound with its many isolated and barbarous rocks; then he said—
"The fire blazed from beside that cone. I recognise its shape," and he pointed to the Heogue towering steeply over Trullyabister and its range of mighty cliffs.
Yaspard shook his head.
"It couldn't be," he said positively; and then his thoughts once more became filled by the image of his little sister all alone in the Osprey drifting out to sea as the evening fell, and he could not take further interest in the Norna's fate. He never even asked if it was likely that any others had escaped the fate of their ship. Signy, in her holiday attire, with her bright face blanched with fear, her hands stretched to him, her small slight form bent in the attitude of prayer;—Signy floating away, away, and alone! It was terrible.
He rose up from his place beside the sailor, and going to the other side of the holme, he again knelt down and "wrestled in prayer" for his darling. Never once did he think of his own serious position, beyond desiring fervently that help might come in time to enable him to go in search of his sister with some hope of finding her.
But the twilight came slowly and softly down, and some sea-fowl who were wont to nest on Yelholme circled around it, clamouring to find their night abode invaded, but no welcome boat appeared.
The sailor gradually fell into an exhausted sleep, which looked so like death that Yaspard's heart sank with a new fear, and he scarcely dared bend over the still, prostrate figure lest he should find that fear realised. By-and-by the mists drew nearer, wrapping the holme in their filmy veil; then the sea-birds, emboldened by the motionless silence of the castaways, dropped upon the crags, and folded their wings for the night. Around the lonely islet thundered the ocean, whose waves rocked never-endingly, until Yaspard, gazing fixedly on them, felt as though the holme itself were some tremulous cradle swinging with the rhythmical ebb and flow of those majestic billows.
His brain seemed on fire, however, and would not be lulled to sleep by the influence of night and the anthem of ocean. The poor lad suffered such torment of soul as we can scarcely imagine; to the young, compulsory inaction during mental pain is almost unendurable, and sometimes Yaspard felt that to fling himself into the water, to struggle there and drown, would be better than sitting on the holme idle, helpless, picturing Signy's fate.
He gave up at last gazing on the sea, which seemed to mock his hopes and fears with its monotonous roll and roar, and fixed his eyes on the dim outline of the Heogue, which his sister had named "Boden's purple crown;" and he wondered if Signy could see the dear old hill from her place amid the waves. He would not think that the Osprey had capsized or broken on some crag, but continued to picture the child in the boat as he had last seen her.