Up swung the boat; the girl extended her hands, which were instantly grasped. ‘Jump, madam!’ and she went in a graceful bound from the thwart to the deck.
I watched till a heave brought me on a line with the chains into which I jumped.
‘Now, Mr. Colledge!’ called out the lieutenant. He hung in the wind, and I thought he would refuse to leave the boat; but Miss Temple with her face slightly flushed stood watching as though waiting for him, her noble figure swaying with a marvellous careless grace upon the floating slopes of the planks; and this started him. He got on to a thwart, where he was supported by a sailor till a chance offered for his hands to be gripped, and then he was hauled on to the hull; but he came perilously near to going overboard, for the sudden sinking away of the cutter from under him paralysed his effort to jump, and he swung against the side of the wreck in the grasp of the lieutenant and a seaman, who dragged him up just in time to save his legs from being ground by the soaring of the boat. The two sailors then jumped into the cutter, which shoved off, and lay rising and falling upon the quarter to the scope of her painter.
CHAPTER XVIII
ADRIFT
There was a small deck-house standing abaft the jagged ends of the stump of the mainmast, a low-pitched, somewhat narrow, and rather long structure, with a door facing the wheel, or where the wheel had stood, and a couple of small windows on either hand, the glass of which was entirely gone.
‘The lonely watchman of this wreck is still at home, doubtless waiting to receive us,’ said the lieutenant, pointing to the little building. ‘Shall we pay him a visit?’
‘Oh yes; let us see everything that there may be to look at,’ answered Colledge, who had not yet recovered his breath, but who was working hard, I could see, to regain his late air of vivacity, though he was pale, and shot several uneasy glances around him as he spoke.
‘I would rather not look,’ said Miss Temple; ‘it will make me dream.’