"Yes, but do not bid me risk nothing!" I exclaimed. "We must risk everything--our chances aboard and our chances out of the ship--or you are as good as chained to this vessel for life." She smiled her acquiescence. I looked at her with passionate inquiry, but never did a braver and more resolved heart gaze at a lover from a maiden's eyes. I found the fearlessness of her devotion the more admirable for the dread she had expressed concerning the perils of the coast, and for her speaking thus to me with the land close to and all its wildness and melancholy visible to her, together with the distant smoke, towards which I had seen her glance again and again, and whose meaning she perfectly understood. The ship swam slowly forwards. The coast dried the wind out of the atmosphere, but so much the better, for there was enough to carry us in, and then it could not die too soon to serve my turn. All was ready with the anchors forward, and the men hung about in pallid gangs waiting for orders to take sail off the ship. The vitality of the wondrous craft seemed to lie in the pump and its automatic plyers, so deep was the silence among the crew and so still their postures; but now and again the heavy courses would swing into the masts to the soft bowing of the fabric and raise a feeble thunder-note like to the sound of bowls rolling over hollow ground. The red light in the west lay upon the head of the shaggy line of coast, and the far-off mountains that had been blue went up in a dim purple to the sky; the crimson haze seemed to float over the rugged brink and roll down the slope to the shore, so that the scene was bathed in a most exquisite delicate light--all features touched with red; a bronze as of English autumn upon the green; the white sand gleaming rosily, and great spaces of reddish rubble-like ground glowing dark as blood. But the loneliness! I figured myself ashore there--the ship gone--Imogene gone! I stood in fancy upon the beach looking out on this bare sea; an aged, perhaps worthless firelock by my side, a few cartridges, a week's store of provisions! The moan of the surf was in my ear; every creaking and rustling of the wind in the near bushes startled me. To right and left rolled the coast for endless leagues, and the vast plain of sea, whose multitudinous crying found echoes in a thousand caverns, east and west, and in the reverberating heart of giant cliffs, whose walls were best measured in parallels and meridians, went down into the heavens where the uttermost ends of the earth were.