'Shall we go to work?' said I. She looked at her father wistfully. 'Come,' I exclaimed, 'we _know_ we are right. We must make an effort to save ourselves. Are not our lives our first consideration?' 'I stepped to the door; as I put my hand to it, Captain Nielsen cried: 'If you do not save the ship, how will you save yourselves?' 'We must at once put some sort of raft together,' said I, halting. 'A raft! in this sea!' he clasped his hands and uttered a low mocking laugh that was more shocking in him than the maddest explosion of temper could have shown. I could no longer linger to hear his objections. Helga might be very dear to him, but his ship stood first in his mind, and I had no idea of breaking my heart at the pump and then of being drowned after all. My hope was indeed a forlorn one, but it was a hope for all that; whereas I knew that the ship would give us no chance whatever. Besides, our making ready for the worst would not signify that we should abandon the vessel until her settling forced us over the side. And was the gentle, heroic Helga to perish without a struggle on my part, because her father clung with a sick man's craziness--which in health he might be quick to denounce--to this poor tempest-strained barque that was all he had in the world? I went out and on to the deck, and was standing thinking a minute of the raft and how we should set about it, when Helga joined me. 'He is too ill to be reasonable,' she exclaimed. 'Yes,' said I, 'but we will save him and ourselves too, if we can. Let us lose no more time. Do you observe that the wind has sensibly decreased even while we have been talking in your father's cabin? The sky has opened more yet to windward, and the seas are running with much less weight.' As I spoke the sun flashed into a rift in the vapour sweeping down the eastern heaven, and the glance of the foam to the splendour, and the sudden brightening of the cloud-shadowed sea into blue, animated me like some new-born hope, and was almost as invigorating to my spirits as though my eyes had fallen upon the gleam of a sail heading our way.