the surrounding seas, replied--

"Yes; it must have been the Easting Ban upon which she struck--that's a
sunken rock quite near this holme. But I can't think what light it was
you saw. You see the land on Lunda is very low along the sound, and
there are only a very few people living on my island--that is Boden
there; the light couldn't have been there."

The sailor raised himself on an elbow and looked at the cliffs of
Boden, and the sound with its many isolated and barbarous rocks; then
he said--

"The fire blazed from beside that cone. I recognise its shape," and he
pointed to the Heogue towering steeply over Trullyabister and its range
of mighty cliffs.

Yaspard shook his head.

"It couldn't be," he said positively; and then his thoughts once more
became filled by the image of his little sister all alone in the
_Osprey_ drifting out to sea as the evening fell, and he could not take
further interest in the _Norna's_ fate. He never even asked if it was
likely that any others had escaped the fate of their ship. Signy, in
her holiday attire, with her bright face blanched with fear, her hands
stretched to him, her small slight form bent in the attitude of
prayer;--Signy floating away, away, and alone! It was terrible.

He rose up from his place beside the sailor, and going to the other
side of the holme, he again knelt down and "wrestled in prayer" for his
darling. Never once did he think of his own serious position, beyond
desiring fervently that help might come in time to enable him to go in
search of his sister with some hope of finding her.

But the twilight came slowly and softly down, and some sea-fowl who
were wont to nest on Yelholme circled around it, clamouring to find
their night abode invaded, but no welcome boat appeared.

The sailor gradually fell into an exhausted sleep, which looked so like
death that Yaspard's heart sank with a new fear, and he scarcely dared
bend over the still, prostrate figure lest he should find that fear
realised. By-and-by the mists drew nearer, wrapping the holme in their
filmy veil; then the sea-birds, emboldened by the motionless silence of
the castaways, dropped upon the crags, and folded their wings for the
night. Around the lonely islet thundered the ocean, whose waves rocked
never-endingly, until Yaspard, gazing fixedly on them, felt as though
the holme itself were some tremulous cradle swinging with the
rhythmical ebb and flow of those majestic billows.