[CHAPTER XXI.]
We will return to Reine Charteris on that terrible night of fire and flood, when, with all the deathless devotion of a true woman's heart she sacrificed herself to save her husband and her friend.
In the minute before the life-boat came into sight Reine's mind had been comparatively calm and contented.
Though she believed that certain death stared her in the face, it had no special terrors for her. Her life had been good and pure, and she had no dread of the hereafter.
The thought of dying with the husband she loved had a strange, romantic sweetness for her heart.
In the bright and awful glare of light thrown upon the waters by the burning ship, her pale and lovely face had upon it an expression of rapt and Heavenly sweetness and content, untouched by dread or fear.
Vane's arm was drawn around her, and they were slowly swimming about and looking for some drifting desperate hope of rescue.
A few minutes ago the black waves, weirdly illumined by the red glare of the flames, had been filled with a writhing, despairing, shrieking mass of anguished humanity, but now they had all disappeared. Some had floated off to a distance, some had sunk beneath the waves and found a watery grave—
"Unknelled, uncoffined, and unsung."
Vane and Reine were quite alone for a moment—alone, and drawn seemingly nearer together than they had ever been in life by the deadly peril that menaced them. They had made up their minds to death. Both were good swimmers, but they were too far from land for their strength and skill to avail. They clung together, each feeling instinctively that death would be less hard if shared together.