"We shall escape yet!" I repeated, hotly, for the very sense of our imprisonment and the helplessness of our condition for the time being, that might be long in terminating, was a thought so maddening that I felt in a temper to defy, scorn and spit in the face of the very Devil himself was he to appear. But I had her right hand pressed to my heart; 'twas sure she felt the comfort of it, and together for some while in silence we stood viewing the ship, the fabric of whose hull stood out as though lined with India ink upon the ashen tremble of froth that seemed to embrace her length like shadowy-white arms, as the wind blowing mildly into her sails forced her to break the water at her stern as she slided athwart the swell. She made a sight to shrink from! The sailor's heart within me sank to this feebly-luminous mystery of aged yet imperishable hull, holding within her creatures so unnatural that the eye of man can view the like of them nowhere else, and raising her structure of ancient sail and masts to the stars which glided in blue and green and white along the yards with the rolling of her. Little wonder that she should affright the mariner who meets her amid the lonely paths of the vast ocean she haunts. I clasped my brow with bewilderment in my brain. "Surely," I cried to my companion, "I am dreaming. It cannot be that I at this moment am standing on the deck of the Death Ship!" She sought to soothe me, but she was startled by my behaviour, and that perception enabled me to rally. If she as a weak and lonely maiden could bravely support five years of life amid this crew, what craven was I to have my brain confused by only seven days' association, spent mainly in her company? Heaven forgive me. But methinks I realised our condition--all that it might hereafter signify--with a keenness of insight, present and prophetic, which would be impossible in her whose knowledge of the sea was but a child's when she fell into Vanderdecken's hands. "We must have patience, courage and hope, Mr. Fenton," she said, softly. "Look at that starry jewel yonder," and she turned up her face to the cross that hung above the mizzen topmast-head, gleaming very gloriously in a lake of deep indigo betwixt two clouds. "It shines for me! and often have I looked up at it with full eyes and a prayer in my heart. It shines for you, too! It is the emblem of our redemption, and we must drink in faith that God will succour us from it." She continued to gaze at it, and there was sheen enough to enable me to see a tender smile upon her upturned face. How sweet did she then appear, fairer than the "evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars," as the poet wrote. I looked up to that sparkling Cross and thought how strange it was that the Sentence pronounced upon this ship should doom her to sail eternally over waters above which there nightly rises the lustrous symbol of Compassion and Mercy.