"Who in the world would have expected to meet you here!" said the lady, recovering first from a moment's embarrassed silence; "certainly the last spot on earth I should ever look for the gay, pleasure-loving Willard Drummond. So, sir, I presume you have been 'taking the world easy,' here in this Enchanted Isle, while your poor, deluded friends were laboring under the conviction you were improving your mind—-which needed improving, goodness knows—by foreign travel? Pretty conduct, Mr. Drummond, I must say!"
"Oh, Laura! Laura! how little did I dream, last night, you were in that fatal ship!" he exclaimed, passionately.
"Ugh! yes; wasn't it awful?" said the young girl, with a shudder. "I'll never get the horrid sight and sounds of that dreadful night out of my mind while I live. Oh! to have heard the screams, and cries, and prayers, and blasphemies of the drowning crew, mingling with the fearful storm, was appalling. Holy saints! I hear them yet!"
With a convulsive shudder, she hid her face in her hands.
"Thank Heaven your life was saved, at least," said Drummond, with fervor.
"Yes, our escape was little less than miraculous. I remember some one making me fast to a floating spar, as the ship struck; then the waves swept furiously over me, and I remember no more, until I awoke and found kind friends chafing my hands and temples. Was it you who saved me, Willard?"
"Not exactly. The waves washed you ashore, and my part of it was merely to have you conveyed up here. But how little did I dream then, that Laura Britton was so near!"
"Laura Courtney, if you please, Mr. Drummond," she said, quietly. "I have had the honor of changing my name since I saw you last."
"And you have married Edgar Courtney! Oh, Laura, Laura?" he said, reproachfully.
Her eyes flashed as she faced suddenly round, and said, sharply: