d marble, still I
did it not.

When, a week before, I had stored the boat with food and drink and had
brought it to that lonely wharf, I had thought that if at the last my
wife willed to flee I would attempt to reach the bay, and passing out
between the capes would go to the north. Given an open boat and the
tempestuous seas of November, there might be one chance out of a hundred
of our reaching Manhattan and the Dutch, who might or might not give us
refuge. She had willed to flee, and we were upon our journey, and the
one chance had vanished. That wan, monotonous, cold, and clinging mist
had shrouded us for our burial, and our grave yawned beneath us.

The day passed and the night came, and still we fought the sea, and
still the wind drove us whither it would. The night passed and the
second morning came, and found us yet alive. My wife lay now at my feet,
her head pillowed upon the bundle she had brought from the minister's
house. Too weak for speech, waiting in pain and cold and terror for
death to bring her warmth and life, the knightly spirit yet lived in her
eyes, and she smiled when I bent over her with wine to moisten her lips.
At length she began to wander in her mind, and to speak of summer days
and flowers. A hand held my heart in a slowly tightening grip of iron,
and the tears ran down the minister's cheeks. The man who had darkened
her young life, bringing her to this, looked at her with an ashen face.

As the day wore on, the gray of the sky paled to a dead man's hue and
the wind lessened, but the waves were still mountain high. One moment
we poised, like the gulls that now screamed about us, upon some giddy
summit, the sky alone above and around us; the next we sank into dark
green and glassy caverns. Suddenly the wind fell away, veered, and rose
again like a giant refreshed.

Diccon started, put his hand to his ear, then sprang to his feet.
"Breakers!" he cried hoarsely.

We listened with straining ears. He was right. The low, ominous murmur
changed to a distant roar, grew louder yet, and yet louder, and was no
longer distant.

"It will be the sand islets off Cape Charles, sir," he said. I nodded.
He and I knew there was no need of words.

The sky grew paler and paler, and soon upon the woof of the clouds
a splash of dull yellow showed where the sun would be. The fog rose,
laying bare the desolate ocean. Before us were two very small islands,
mere handfuls of sand, lying side by side, and encompa