Bride spoke calmly, but her heart was throbbing wildly the whole time. In her head was beating the ceaseless repetition of the one name--“Eustace! Eustace! Eustace!” She seemed all at once to understand the meaning of her troubled dream, and the cry which had awakened her. Eustace was truly in some deadly peril, and her name had been upon his lips, as it was in his heart, at the supreme moment when he believed himself passing from life to death. Bride had too full a belief in the independent life of the spirit to feel any great surprise at such a thing as this. The power and the deep mystery of love were a part of her creed. She held that a true and God-given love was as immortal as the soul--was the very essence of the soul; and now that she fully recognised the depth of her own love for Eustace, she could well believe (knowing his love for her) that his spirit would seek to meet hers in the supreme moment when he thought death was coming upon him. But, surely--ah! surely, her prayer for him, which had immediately followed upon that cry, would have been heard in heaven, and God would give him back to her! Ah! how she had prayed for this man--body, soul, and spirit! How she had poured out herself in supplication for him again and yet again, that his heart might be changed and softened, that the Spirit of grace might work therein, that he might learn to know his Saviour, and that his body might be preserved from all perils. Bride had that faith which believes all things; and even through the anxious terrors of that night she believed that Eustace would be given back to her. She believed absolutely that he had been in deadly peril, that the cry she had heard in her dreams was no dream, but that it portended some crisis in the life of her lover. She knew that he was likely to be at sea to-night, and coming down Channel along these very coasts. It might indeed have been his vessel that these desperate men had striven to wreck. She never tried to fight against the conviction that something terrible had befallen Eustace that night; but so convinced was she that God had heard her prayers, and had made of her an instrument for the deliverance and saving of her lover, that she was able to retain her calmness and tranquillity, even through that terrible hour of suspense, saying always to herself-- “Perhaps it is the Father’s way of leading home the erring son. Perhaps it was in the darkness and the storm that He went out to meet him. I think he will be given back to me; but even if not, and he is in the safe-keeping of the Father, I can bear it. But I believe I shall receive him back as from the dead.”