I resumed my place at the oar, and through the blackness drove the boat, the sail pulling briskly, the water shining very brightly in our wake, and, as my ear seemed to fancy, the noise of the surf dwindling somewhat, whence I conjectured we were hauling off the coast and standing more directly seawards. I do not know that I should have been without hope for my beloved if it had not been for the haunting and blasting thought that nothing but misery could attend association with Vanderdecken and his doomed ship. It seemed to me now--though on board I had been too eager to escape with her, too wrapped up in my love for such consideration to occupy my mind--that nothing less than the death of one of us could expiate our involuntary and unhappy connexion with the banned and fated craft. Ships that spoke her perished, often with all hands; misfortunes pursued those who merely sighted her. What sort of death could the Curse involve for one who had lived for years or for weeks in the monstrous fabric, who had conversed familiarly with her abhorred occupants, who had been admitted into close inspection of her secret life, beheld the enactment by Vanderdecken in his sleep of the impious and horrible drama of his Christ-defying wrath, eat of his bread, drank of his cup, yea, and hearkened with sympathy to his talk of home, to his yearning speech concerning those he loved there? The sense of the doom that was upon her as upon me--upon her in her young and beautiful life, upon me in my love for her, upon both in the crushing separation of the grave, whether 'twas for her to die or for me; oh! I say, the sense of this thing weighed as iron and as ice upon my heart, crushing out all hope and leaving me as blind in my soul as my eyes were in the fog to steer the boat through the silence of that vaporous night, hearing nothing but the rippling of the water, and the blunted edge of the surf's wild beat, and beholding nothing but the outline of my dearest--of my dearest--stricken and dying at my feet! Suddenly the fog broke up. It was then about two o'clock. The vapour floated into league-long streaks, lunar-tinted here and there into an ærial mockery of the rainbow, and over the edge of one great steam-like body the moon with an ice-like, diamond-splendour of radiance looked down upon us out of a pool of black sky. The lustre had something of the sharpness of daylight, only that the flooded pearl of it wore the complexion of death, all things showing out wan; and in that illumination the delicate gold of Imogene's hair melted into the extreme pallor of the forehead on which it stirred to the wind, and her lips were of the colour of her cheeks, and her half-closed lids like wax. I let go the oar to kneel and look at her. She lay so still, with such unheeding eyes, that I made sure she was dead, and my brain reeled as though my heart had stopped. I said hoarsely and hollowly, "Imogene."