All this while the lady had remained on deck. It was about eight o’clock, and very dark. My watch had come round, and the brig would be in my charge till midnight; but, watch or no watch, I should have kept a lookout until I had secured the three-mile offing. The island was on the starboard quarter, scarcely distinguishable now--a dim smudge, like smoke. Happening to look through the skylight, I saw the cloth laid for supper. Indeed, supper was ready. Salt beef and ham were on the table, together with biscuits, pickles, and a pot or two of preserves, a small decanter of rum for my use, and a bottle of Greaves’ red wine for the lady. She had tasted nothing, as I presumed, since her arrival on board in the morning. She stood at the rail, looking out to sea, a pathetic figure of loneliness, indeed, when you thought of what she had suffered, what she was freshly delivered from; when you thought again of her solitude of dumbness, as you might well term her tongue’s incapacity aboard this brig of English and Dutch. Most heartily did I yearn to speak soothingly and hopefully, to bid her be of good cheer when she thought of her mother, to beg her persuade herself that her mother was rescued and sailing to Europe, even as she, the señorita, was thither bound. “Weel, weel, there’s Ane abune a’!” says the gypsy in the Scotch novel, and that was the substance of what I wanted to tell the lady Aurora. And what did I say? Why, I just coughed to let her know that I was at her elbow. I had no other language than a cough. She quietly looked round and began “_Yo no lo_----” then broke off, arrested by remembering that I knew not one syllable of her tongue. I motioned to the skylight and pointed down, and made signs for her to go below and sup. She signed to me to accompany her. I shook my head, pointing to the sails and to the sea, and cursing my ignorance that obliged me to make a baboon of myself with my limbs and head. She bowed and went to the companion hatch, and on looking down a few minutes later I saw her seated at the table. She had removed her hat; her brow showed white in the lamplight under the magnificent masses of her dead black hair. The jewels upon her fingers sparkled as, with a leisureliness that had something of stateliness in it, she helped herself to the food before her. Once again I admired the beauty of her hands, and then I turned my back upon the novel and beautiful picture of this fine Spanish woman to look to the brig. CHAPTER XIX. OFF THE ISLAND. The brig slipped cleverly through the sea. It was like gently tearing through silk with a razor to listen to the noise that floated aft from her cutwater. When I guessed the island to be about three miles distant I hove the vessel to. Yan Bol’s pipe shrilled with an edge that seemed to fetch an echo from the furthest reaches of the dark sea. When the sails were to the mast the brig lay motionless under her topsails and standing jib.