“Frank! Frank!” she murmured. “We’ve been happy on her, after all. Shall we be equally happy elsewhere? I--I would be glad to stay here with you if-- Oh! I know it’s impossible, of course. We must go back to the world and clear your name. Yes, we will! We must! God is good. I have confidence in His justice. He would not have let me love you so much if He didn’t mean to clear you.” Hand in hand the two followed the others, already well ahead, plunging straight into the wreck-pack. Howard drew a long breath when they were well away without having seen any sign of Forbes or his companions. Unfortunately, though he saw no one, he did not go unseen. As the little party vanished among the tangle of masts and sails, a man rose from behind a deckhouse, where he had been lurking, and peered after it till certain of its course, then he set off for the village as fast as he could go. XVI IT is one thing to lay a course even in the open sea, and it is quite another to follow it. Wind, waves, and currents often drive a vessel from the way she wishes to go; and all of these had acted on the wreck-path, seemingly conspiring to make difficult the line of progress that Howard had mapped out. Again and again he had to make long detours to pass some insurmountable wreck that lay across his path, and finally he had to turn aside from it altogether to skirt a narrow but impassable channel of weed-grown water that corkscrewed unexpectedly across his path. “It’s that hurricane we had a month agone,” explained Joyce. “It isn’t often they come here, but when they do, faith it’s the foine mix-up they make! I moind one of thim ten years agone! It split the pack for miles back, and filled the hole up again with wrecks that would have made the fortune of a dime-museum man, so they would. The most of them were fair rotten with age, and sank as soon as they began to rub up against the strong new ships. The last storm wasn’t so bad, and, belike, it only split the pack here and there.” Howard nodded. The explanation seemed very probable, as in no other way could he account for the open channel in the midst of the vessel-wrecks. Mere mutual attraction ought to have closed it up years before. It made him anxious, for the channel had already led him a mile deeper into the pack than he had intended to go, and still showed no signs of ending. It might go on even to the heart of the wreckage, where lay the ancient ships on which all food had rotted away centuries before. If a former storm had opened up a channel that far, so might a later one.