I had no fear of its not floating high, nor of its not holding together: but it would be impossible to express the heaviness of heart with which I laboured at this thing. The raft had always been the most dreadful nightmare of the sea to my imagination. The stories of the sufferings it had been the theatre of were present to my mind as I worked, and again and again they would cause me to break off and send a despairing look round; but never a sail showed; the blankness was that of the heavens. We had half-masted a second Danish ensign after coming out from breaking our fast, and one needed but to look at the breezy rippling of its large folds to know that the wind was rapidly becoming scant. By one o'clock, indeed, it was blowing no more than a pleasant air of wind, still out of the north-east. The stormy, smoke-like clouds of the morning were gone, and the sky was now mottled by little heaps of prismatic vapour that sailed slowly under a high delicate shading of cloud, widely broken, and showing much clear liquid blue, and suffering the sun to shine very steadily. There was a long swell rolling out of the north-east; but the brows were so wide apart that there was no violence whatever in the swaying of the barque upon it. The wind crisped these swinging folds of water, and the surface of the ocean scintillated with lines of small seas feathering, with merry curlings, into foam. But it was fine-weather water, and the barometer had risen greatly, and I could now believe that there was nothing more in the rapidity of its indications than a promise of a pleasant day and of light winds. I could have done nothing without Helga. Her activity, her intelligence, her spirit, were amazing, not indeed only because she was a girl, but because she was a girl who had undergone a day and two frightful nights of peril and distress, who had slept but little, whose labours at the pump might have exhausted a seasoned sailor. She seemed to know exactly what to do, was wise in every suggestion, and I could never glance at her face without finding the sweetness of it rendered noble by the heroism of the heart that showed in her firm mouth, her composed countenance, and steadfast, determined gaze.