'Haul out!' cried the mate, and nimbly, with quick steady pulls, the cask was run up the rope. It travelled smoothly. The man sprang on to the bulwark rail and received it, and, putting his hand on the edge of it, jumped in. 'By thunder, no, then! The lady first, or you stop there!' groaned the mate, his face suddenly dark with disgust and temper, and the others looked along the rope to the cask with frowns eloquent of curses. But in a moment the man got out, and I said, 'He was testing it.' We now saw him, in the sharp white light the air was brimful of, help Marie on to the rail: he put his hands under her arms, and carefully sank her into the cask; then, pulling off his cap, flourished a signal of 'all's ready' to us. Instantly, one end of the line was slackened away whilst the other end was hauled upon, and the cask travelled towards us. 'Stand by to lift the lady out,' bawled the mate, whilst the cask was still coming. 'Into the bows two of you. Mr. Moore, you'll keep your seat, I beg sir, till the lady's in the boat.' The cask came sliding to the drag of the line down to the very stern of the boat: there it was water-borne, and began to roll and leap with the boat: but strong hands were ready, and in a minute Marie was lifted over the gunwale, brought right aft, and seated beside me. CHAPTER XXVIII MR. MOORE ENDS HIS STORY I took her by the hands and looked her in the face, and brought her to my heart, and a sob shook me as I kissed her. For some moments she merely pronounced my name, straining from my grasp to look at me. There was something wild in the light of her soft eyes then. Maybe the passions and sensations which in a sudden surprise of meeting would have forced us into transports had abated; we had long both known that we were near to each other, she that I had come to rescue her, I that she was alive on that wreck up there. But for all that, and as long as they were bringing the man from the wreck, it remained a sort of unreality, a mission too marvellous to have been fulfilled, a hope too daring, too defiant of death itself and all the terrors of this barbarous, savage scene, to have been humanly possible. A wonder, too, lay in her beauty and healthful looks. My imaginations of her state, now as lying in her coffin at Cape Town, now as dead of the cold in that same wreck we had brought her from, had coloured to me a ghastly portrait of my memory of her; or, even when figuring her alive in the hull, I conceived her bloodless, gaunt, sunk-eyed, a sad, heart-sickening spectre of herself. Instead I found her fairer, healthier, plumper by a hundredfold than she had shown when she left England. She was dressed in furs: her hat was a turban of sealskin; her hair was a little wild, but its dishevelment was a grace.