flatter ourselves, with
a shy glance of interest and recognition for us in the luminous
eyes.

On her strange companion, also, her presence shed a beam that lightened
the darkness of our thoughts toward him. We marked the long, dark
lashes of her eyes rising and falling, now trustingly, now fearingly,
before that inscrutable countenance, as if her spirit wavered between
a dream of terror and a contentful awaking. And many imagined that,
as those dark eyes began to turn more lovingly and more longingly
toward him, the strange brilliance of his own became imbued with
their softness, while a faint auroral tinge seemed just ready to
change his countenance from marble to flesh and blood.

Thus day after day we crept along the European coast, enjoying a
dream of romance in which we could have gone on sailing contentedly
forever, our only cause of uneasiness being that, at some of the
numerous ports we touched, the magic presence on which the spell
depended might go from us, as it came to us, without ceremony or
warning, and leave us to cross the great ocean in the world of
intolerable loneliness that would settle on the ship when she was
gone. There was something like a patriotic aspiration in our desire
to transplant this brightest of Eastern blossoms to diffuse its
supreme beauty and sweetness in the West. And though we feared for
her the stormy autumn passage of the Atlantic, a load was taken
from every spirit when we left the Pillars of Hercules behind us
and pointed our prow straight out across the cloud-bound ocean.

Just as we lost sight of land, we were attacked by a most violent
storm, that buffeted us for many a day, during which we saw nothing
of our fair passenger, and we learned that she was seriously ill.
But never had invalid such a nurse as she. No one knew if he slept
or ate, and no one was allowed to share his office, and no one
obtruded on him the sorrow or sympathy which all felt in spite
of our engrossing battle for life against the tempest. For though
there was no change in his appearance or demeanor, all were conscious
that a deep feeling stirred his heart. Even when we doubted if
all our energies could preserve the vessel from being dashed back
upon the coast we had just left, he gave us neither help nor heed,
till in the final moment when we had given up all for lost, he
seized the helm and shot us into shelter and safety behind the reef
whereon we expected to go to pieces, through a channel which