'Our horizon is narrow,' answered I. 'Does it exceed three miles? I should say not, save when the swell lifts us, and then, perhaps, we may see four. Four miles of sea!' I cried. 'There may be a dozen ships within three leagues of us, all of them easily within sight from the maintop of the _Anine_, were she afloat. But what, short of a straight course for the raft, could bring this speck of timber on which we stand into view? This is the sort of situation to make one understand what is signified by the immensity of the ocean.' She shivered and clasped her hands. 'That I--that we,' she exclaimed, speaking slowly and almost under her breath, 'should have brought you to this pass, Mr. Tregarthen! It was our fate by rights--but it ought not to be yours!' 'You asked me to call you Helga,' said I; 'and you must give me my Christian name.' 'What is it?' she asked. 'Hugh.' 'It is a pretty name. If we are spared, it will be sweet to my memory while I have life!' She said this with an exquisite artlessness, with an expression of wonderful sweetness and gentleness in her eyes, which were bravely fastened upon me, and then, suddenly catching up my hand, put her lips to it and pressed it to her heart, letting it fall as she turned her face upon the water on that side of the raft where her father's body had sunk. My spirits, which remained tolerably buoyant while the sun stood high, sank as he declined. The prospect of another long night upon the raft, and of all that might happen in a night, was insupportable. I had securely bound the planks together, as I believed, but the constant play of the swell was sure to tell after a time. One of the ligatures might chafe through, and in a minute the whole fabric scatter under our feet like the staves of a stove boat, and leave us no more than a plank to hold on by in the midst of this great sea which all day long had been without ships. I often bitterly deplored I had not brought a sail from the barque, for the air that hung steady all day blew landwards, and there was no weight in it to have carried away the flimsiest fabric we could have erected. A sail would have given us a drift--perhaps have put us in the way of sighting a vessel, and in any case it would have mitigated the intolerable sense of helpless imprisonment which came to one with thoughts of the raft floating without an inch of way upon her, overhanging all day long, as it might have seemed, that very spot of waters in which Helga's father had found his grave. Shortly before sundown Helga sighted a sail in the south-west. It was the merest shaft of pearl gleaming above the ocean rim, and visible to us only when the quiet heave of the sea threw us up. It was no more than a vessel's topmost canvas, and before the sun was gone the dim starlike sheen of those cloths had faded out into the atmosphere.