Page:Left to Themselves (1891).djvu/150



OW, all night long those two floated. For hours there was but a step between them and death; but death kept its distance. The boat, like some treacherous, living thing, whose cruelty had been appeased in that angry overturn, was pacified now, and seemed resolved to protect the remnant of its charge. It rode lightly over crest after crest. They bailed it out as well as they could, and disposed carefully the odds and ends left in it—a shawl, a bottle, a soaked bundle of clothing—poor relics, terribly eloquent. They fought away the chill and misery of their situation as well as Philip's energy could devise, and not unsuccessfully. Before long he took the tiller in the darkness, and with straining eyes and tense nerves aided the boat to weather the subsiding seas.

They could not talk much—a few sentences here and there, and then long silence. Gerald