The sun went down below the horizon with the suddenness general in the Southern Ocean. Once more darkness was upon them. With the return of night came a sense of forlornness and desolation of spirit. They fell silent, each brooding on the sad fate which had overtaken their uncle and them. The night was cold; enveloped in their wraps and macintoshes they huddled together for warmth, letting the boat drift at the mercy of the sea. Their broken sleep on the previous night, and their exertions and anxieties during the day, had told upon them, and after some hours the two younger girls fell asleep. Elizabeth dared not surrender herself to slumber. Who could tell what might happen? As the eldest, she felt a motherly responsibility for the others, though she had to confess to herself how utterly helpless she was if danger came. She sat with her elbows on her knees, thinking, brooding. Everything had happened so suddenly that she was only just beginning to realize the immensity of the disaster. A cockle-shell of a boat, that would capsize if the sea were the least bit rough; the wide ocean all around; three girls, healthy enough, but not inured to hardship; the possibility of drifting for days or weeks, never touching land or coming within the track of a ship; food dwindling day by day; the horrors of thirst: these dreadful images flashed in turn upon Elizabeth's mental vision and made her shudder.
"Why didn't we stay with Uncle?" she thought; and then the remembrance of the dear old man, and their happy days on board, and her conviction that the vessel had gone down before the raft could be made, smote Elizabeth's heart with grief, and for the first time the tears rolled down her cheeks, unchecked.
She wept till her head ached, and she felt dazed. At last, utterly worn out, she dozed into an uneasy and fitful sleep, still supporting her head on her hands. She woke every few minutes, blamed herself for not keeping a better watch, then slumbered again. She was startled into wakefulness by the rays of the early morning sun. Lifting herself stiffly, and carefully, so as not to disturb the two girls at her feet, she looked around, and was alarmed as she caught sight of a ring of white within a few hundred yards of the starboard side of the boat. At the first glance she recognized the foam of breakers dashing over a reef.
"Girls!" she cried, "wake up! Quick!" She released herself from them, seized the sculls, and pulled energetically away from the threatened danger. Tommy threw off her macintosh and stood up in the boat.
"Land!" she cried. "Look, Mary, beyond the breakers there. Woods! Oh! I could scream for joy."
"Look out for a landing-place," said Elizabeth, as she rowed slowly parallel with the reef.
"What if there are savages?" murmured Mary.
"Oh, we'll soothe their savage breasts," cried Tommy confidently. "I don't care if there are so long as my feet are on dry land again. Can you see the raft?"
There was no sign of a raft; nothing was in sight but the foam-swept reef, the cliffs, and the dark background of woods behind.
A pull of half-a-mile brought the dinghy clear of the breakers, and the girls saw the sea dashing up the face of the high weather-worn cliffs. There appeared to be no beach, no possible landing-place. Mary, the bookworm of the family, began to fear that the land was only one of those precipitous crags of which she had read, inaccessible from the sea. But in a few minutes they discerned to their joy a gap in the cliffs, and a sandy cove that promised an easy landing-place.