ompass, and steered the course exactly all night,
according to Wylie's orders, changing the helmsman every four hours.

Mr. Hazel, without a word, put a rug round Miss Rolleston's shoulders,
and another round her feet.

"Oh, not both, sir, please," said she.

"Am I to be disobeyed by everybody?" said he.

Then she submitted in silence, and in a certain obsequious way that was
quite new and well calculated to disarm anger.

Sooner or later all slept, except the helmsman.

At daybreak Mr. Hazel was wakened by a loud hail from a man in the bows.

All the sleepers started up.

"Long-boat not in sight!"

It was too true. The ocean was blank. Not a sail, large or small, in
sight.

Many voices spoke at once.

"He has carried on till he has capsized her."

"He has given us the slip."

Unwilling to believe so great a calamity, every eye peered and stared all
over the sea. In vain. Not a streak that could be a boat's hull, not a
speck that could be a sail.

The little cutter was alone upon the ocean. Alone, with scarcely two
days' provisions, nine hundred miles from land, and four hundred miles to
leeward of the nearest sea-road.

Hazel, seeing his worst forebodings realized, sat down in moody, bitter,
and boding silence.

Of the other men some raged and cursed. Some wept aloud.

The lady, more patient, put her hands together and prayed to Him who made
the sea and all that therein is. Yet her case was the cruelest. For she
was by nature more timid than the men, yet she must share their desperate
peril. And then to be alone with all these men, and one of them had told
her he loved her, and hated the man she was betrothed to! Shame tortured
this delicate creature, as well as fear. Happy for her that of late, and
only of late, she had learned to pray in earnest. _"Qui precari novit,
premi potest, non potest opprimi."_

It was now a race between starvation and drowning, and either way death
stared them in the face.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE long-boat was, at this moment, a hundred miles to windward of the
cutter.

The fact is that Wylie, the evening before, had been secretly perplexed
as to the best course. He had decided to run for the island; but he was
not easy under his own decision; and, at night, he got more and more
discontented with it. Finally, at nine o'clock P.M., he suddenly gave the
order to luff, and tack; and by daybreak he was very near the place where
the _Proserpine_ went down, whereas the