How had it all come about?
Feminine curiosity made her put aside her vow of silence, and she looked at him with wide, solemn eyes, murmuring:
“Where is the boat?”
“You fell out of it and sank, and those wretches left you to your fate. I saw them and swam near, catching you as you came to the surface.”
“Then—I—owe—you—my—life!”
“Yes,” he answered, and she wondered at the sweet, significant smile that played around his lips.
He dared not tell his companion, either, of how the fiends in the boat had cast her out into the sea to perish. The shock would be too great to her nerves, already shattered by grief at her father’s loss.
He said to himself that if they escaped the perils of the sea the time might come when he could safely tell her these things and ask her to give him her life that he had saved to gladden his home forever.
Higher and higher climbed the sun in the heavens, and the sea glittered with a brilliancy that pained their eyes while the whitecapped waves rocked them on the breast of old ocean, the only living objects in the scene, while far in the distance the smoldering hulk of the Atlanta was slowly sinking from sight as it burned to the water’s edge.
They kept close together, their eyes turned on the far distance, watching for the gleam of a sail that might presage rescue, but at last hope began to die in their hearts, they were so weary with the buffeting of the cruel waves and the hot glare of the sun that they were almost ready to close their eyes on the waste of sunlit water and sink down, down, down, through the cool, green darkness to eternal rest.