nitude,
and swung them higher and lower. The boat rocked, received a smart slap
of the waves now and then, and wheeled round, so that the lightship
which stolidly winked at them from the quicksand, the single object
which told them of their bearings, was sometimes on their right hand and
sometimes on their left. Nevertheless they could always discern from it
that their course, whether stemwards or sternwards, was steadily south.

A bright idea occurred to the young man. He pulled out his handkerchief
and, striking a light, set it on fire. She gave him hers, and he made
that flare up also. The only available fuel left was the small umbrella
the girl had brought; this was also kindled in an opened state, and he
held it up by the stem till it was consumed.

The lightship had loomed quite large by this time, and a few minutes
after they had burnt the handkerchiefs and umbrella a coloured flame
replied to them from the vessel. They flung their arms round each other.

'I knew we shouldn't be drowned!' said Avice hysterically.

'I thought we shouldn't too,' said he.

With the appearance of day a boat put off to their assistance, and they
were towed towards the heavy red hulk with the large white letters on
its side.

3. VII. AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT

The October day thickened into dusk, and Jocelyn sat musing beside the
corpse of Mrs. Pierston. Avice having gone away nobody knew whither, he
had acted as the nearest friend of the family, and attended as well as
he could to the sombre duties necessitated by her mother's decease. It
was doubtful, indeed, if anybody else were in a position to do so. Of
Avice the Second's two brothers, one had been drowned at sea, and the
other had emigrated, while her only child besides the present Avice had
died in infancy. As for her friends, she had become so absorbed in her
ambitious and nearly accomplished design of marrying her daughter to
Jocelyn, that she had gradually completed that estrangement between
herself and the other islanders which had been begun so long ago as
when, a young woman, she had herself been asked by Pierston to marry
him. On her tantalizing inability to accept the honour offered, she and
her husband had been set up in a matter-of-fact business in the stone
trade by her patron, but that unforgettable request in the London studio
had made her feel ever since a refined kinship with sculpture, and a
proportionate aloofness from mere quarrying, which